HTC Desire 530 review – a dotty disappointment

HTC is known for producing stunning smartphones, such as the HTC 10 with its double-chamfered edges and the Desire 820 with its gorgeous dual-colour unibody design. The Desire 530, is HTC’s budget smartphone, which has a dotty ‘micro splash’ finish making it one of the most characterful smartphones available.

In comparison to its budget competitors, the Desire 530 stands out with its unique paint-speckled polycarbonate shell – this comes from HTC’s manufacturing process, which applies different colours to the phone’s body at varying degrees of pressure and viscosity.

However, there’s lots of competition, such as the 3rd Gen Moto G at £160 (previously £130) and the better Moto G4 at £170 – the HTC Desire 530 has

It’s certainly a lovely thing to behold, and the grey and gold dot combo I saw at MWC in February 2016 is by far the most eye-catching one of the lot. There’s also a white version with a red and blue dot pattern, but these colours didn’t stand out nearly as much as the gold dots on the darker model. I do quite like each one’s matching coloured, textured power button on the side of the phone, though, as its extra ridges not only look and feel great under your thumb, but it also makes it very easy to find when you run your hand along the edge of the handset.

With such a gorgeous design at its disposal, it seems odd, then, that the Desire 530 is also available in plain old block grey and white models, like the one I was sent for review. I can’t see anyone picking these over the micro splash versions, as the way it looks is easily one of the phone’s greatest assets.

Andorid 6.0 & Sense 7

The attention to detail in the phone’s design also extends to the main interface. HTC’s Sense 7, which runs on top of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, is one of the best and most customisable Android UIs currently available. With its Theme Generator, you can tweak and adjust every aspect of your phone’s appearance, from the font right down to individual app icons.

^ HTC’s Sense 7 interface is excellent, and its Sense Home box on the main home screen helps promote useful apps depending on your location 

There are several ready-made themes available to download for free (including my favourite ‘Origami’ theme, below) from HTC’s Theme Store, but you can also create your own themes using photos in your Gallery. Here, the Theme Generator will analyse the colours present in the picture and give you a wide range of shades and accents to pick from, which you can then fine-tune to your liking. It works brilliantly, and the sheer amount of personalisation on offer has yet to be beaten.

^ Sense 7 is very customisable, and the Origami home theme is one of my favourites

There’s also Sense Home, which automatically rejigs the apps on your main home screen depending on whether you’re at home, work or on the move. By learning which apps you use most often in which locations, the aim is to make sure all your favourite apps are front and centre when you need them most, so you don’t have to dive into the app tray or scroll through several home screens to find them. At Home, for instance, it might prioritise YouTube and entertainment apps, while at work it will swap these out for apps like Google Drive and Mail instead. It takes some time for it to get it completely right, but it certainly helps to cuts down on the amount of home screen clutter on show.

Performance

Sadly, the phone’s great looks are marred by its rather sluggish processor. Powered by just a quad-core 1.1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 chip – the same processor which dragged down the similarly-priced Microsoft Lumia 650 – and 1.5GB of RAM, the Desire 530 can feel a bit slow and unresponsive under load. Admittedly, HTC has since informed me that the original Desire 530 I reviewed only had pre-pre-release software, so it may not have been an accurate representation of its true speed.

However, I’ve since retested the phone with the final version of its software, and I have to say there’s definitely been an improvement in its overall speed. It’s not always evident, as the keyboard still sometimes takes a while to respond to your finger inputs, and apps still occasionally crash, but pressing the home button no longer makes you wait for it to respond, and apps generally opened quite promptly rather leaving you second-guessing as to whether you tapped the icon correctly. It wasn’t completely perfect, mind, as opening Chrome often took a bit longer than I would otherwise like, but on the whole, HTC’s Sense interface generally feels much more pleasant to use.

However, that still didn’t change the Desire 530’s Geekbench 3 scores, as it still only managed rather measly results of 298 in the single core test and 979 in the multicore test – down from 300 and 989 respectively. Web browsing wasn’t much better, either, as it still only managed a Peacekeeper score of 439. Unsurprisingly, the Desire 530 continues to struggle with media-heavy web pages, and it would often lag behind my thumb swipes when scrolling up and down articles. Compare these scores to the 3rd Gen Moto G, which scored 531 and 1,625 in Geekbench 3 and 781 in Peacekeeper and the difference is clear as day.

^ The plain versions of the HTC Desire 530 aren’t nearly as attractive as the micro splash models

It’s not really built for playing 3D games either, as Hearthstone was a bit of a juddering mess. While not wholly unplayable, it was very stop-start when laying down new cards and initiating attacks. Again, I wasn’t expecting much given its score of just 107 frames (or 1.7fps) in the offscreen Manhattan test of GFX Bench GL 3.0, but even something simple like Threes wasn’t quite as slick as I’d normally expect.

Battery Life

As for battery life, the Desire 530 should just about get you through the day, but its 9h 02m of continuous video playback at a screen brightness of 170cd/m2 is below average even for a budget handset. The 3rd Gen Moto G, for example, lasted 11h 12m under the same conditions, making the Desire 530 less reliable over the course of a heavy day’s usage.

Camera

Its 8-megapixel rear camera was also quite disappointing, as this produced very cool photos which were very poorly exposed. Shadow areas were particularly messy and lacking in detail, but some areas had such crushingly bright whites that you couldn’t even make out what I was shooting. Thankfully, switching to HDR mode helped rectify some of these exposure issues, but it also made my photos look incredibly unnatural and artificial.

^ Exposure levels are way off in this photo, with some buildings having been completely whited out

^ HDR mode managed to get the camera’s exposure levels under control, but the resulting image still looks very artificial

Indoors wasn’t much better, as it struggled to focus properly in low light. The LED flash was also next to useless and even bright lighting conditions still produced very soft, hazy pictures that were lacking in detail.

^ The Desire 530 struggled indoors as well, as object outlines were very soft and blurry and there wasn’t a lot of detail present either

Display

This a shame, as its 5in, 1,280×720 resolution display is reasonably decent for the money. While its sRGB colour gamut coverage only reaches a fairly mediocre 87.6%, images still looked relatively natural, if a little flat, and its contrast ratio of 1,029:1 provided plenty of fine detail. Likewise, a black level of 0.31cd/m2 is pretty good for a budget handset, and its viewing angles are great. It’s perhaps not quite as bright as other entry-level smartphones, as I only measured a peak white level of 318.67cd/m2, but it’s still legible outside as long as you have it turned up to max brightness.

Conclusion

Altogether, though, the Desire 530 just isn’t a good choice for those who like to do a lot on their phone. It looks fantastic and it’s still just about serviceable for short bursts of YouTube, checking the weather and actually being used as a phone rather than a gateway to the internet, but there are much faster, less frustrating handsets available for the same amount of money, such as the 3rd Gen Moto G. Even though the 3rd Gen Moto G is more expensive at £160, it comes with a much better camera has leaps better performance and has the same sized screen as the Desire 530 – making it worth the extra investment. Buy the HTC Desire 530 now from John Lewis