HTC Desire 500 review

Thanks to Motorola’s Moto G, which by virtue of being an almost compromise-free Android smartphone for £130 has thoroughly disrupted the budget smartphone market, new budget phones from other manufacturers were always going to struggle.

The Desire 500 is HTC’s latest effort. We liked the last budget HTC smartphone we saw, the Desire X, which won a Budget Buy award a year ago, so were hopeful the 500 would also be a wallet-friendly champion.

First impressions are certainly good. The Desire 500 is a great-looking phone. It’s a slim handset with bevelled edges and a slightly raised screen, which together give it a chiselled, defined look. Our test handset was the Glacier Blue model, with a white back and metallic turquoise around the sides and surrounding the camera lens. We’re fans of this colour scheme, but there’s also a more restrained black model available. Whichever colour you choose, you’ll have a phone which is both slimmer and more stylish than pretty much any budget handset out there.

DISPLAY

The Desire 500 may look top-drawer, but its specification is more modest. The screen, for example, is an 800×480-pixel model, which was fairly standard for a phone this price until the Moto G came along with its 1,280×720 display. Android looks fine at this resolution, but it’s not ideal for desktop-mode web pages; you can read headlines fine, but you have to zoom in to decipher smaller text. The display is reasonable, with clean whites and no colour tinge, but it’s not particularly inspiring. Most text is grey rather than black, and colours lack punch.

CHIPSET AND BENCHMARKS

The phone has a 1.2GHz quad-core processor, which is standard for the price, and 1GB RAM, which is the minimum we’d expect on an Android handset. The phone is generally a reasonable performer. It’s not quite as slick when going back and forth to the app tray as the Moto G, possibly due to some overhead from HTC’s Sense interface, but it’s quick enough to be perfectly usable.

It’s a slim and lovely phone

One problem we noticed was when using the Chrome browser instead of the default HTC version. Chrome is very slow to respond on desktop mode web pages, with a significant delay between you swiping your finger on the screen and the phone responding. The default browser showed none of these problems. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 1790ms, which is fine for an inexpensive handset, but this was significantly slower than the Moto G’s 1,410ms. However, there was little to choose between the two phones’ web browsing performance when compared side by side.

We had less luck testing the phone’s 3D performance, though, as 3DMark refused to run all its tests. In our subjective tests using Real Racing 3, the game ran smoothly enough, but the game had dialled its resolution and detail settings right down, so the game was no longer very pretty. This isn’t the phone to choose if you want to enjoy all the fancy graphical effects in the latest Android titles.

ANDROID

Whether you like HTC’s extensive interface modifications to Android is really a matter of taste. The most obvious change is the Blink Feed, which first appeared on the HTC One. This is a tiled feed on one of your home screens, showing updates from news sources you choose and your social networks. If you love to keep up with developments and your contacts, you could find it highly useful, but the sources you can choose are limited; you have Reuters, The Financial Times, the Guardian and The Independent, as well as some design blogs, a couple of sports sites and three tech sites. Social networking-wise, Blink Feed supports Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter, but you’re out of luck if you’re a Google+ fan. If you don’t like Blink Feed you can simply ignore it, and set a standard Android home screen as your default.

Blink Feed aggregates all your news in one place

You may find other design decisions more obtrusive. The apps in the app tray, for example, are widely spaced, which leaves only room for nine apps on a screen. You can change this to 16 in the options if you don’t fancy flicking through lots of app screens when you have many apps installed. Generally, though, HTC’s interface is prettier than the stock Android 4.1.2 underpinning it, so we don’t have a problem with the software tweaks. The main problem with the software is how much space it seems to take up; after a factory reset, only 0.9GB of the phone’s 4GB storage remains for apps and files. You’ll definitely need to buy a microSD card and ensure you install bigger apps to the card.

COMPASS AND MAPPING

There were a couple of glaring problems that cropped up during our testing, and both were to do with mapping. The Desire 500 has a terribly weak GPS receiver, which often lost signal when we were driving on the open road. By contrast, the Motorola Moto G could even get a signal indoors by a window, which the Desire 500 refused to do. The other problem was the apparent lack of a compass. This is a serious problem when navigating, especially around town when you emerge from a station and need to know which way to turn. We had to walk a few yards and see in which direction the blob on the map moved, and definitely missed the reassuring direction arrow in Google Maps.

CAMERA

The Desire 500 has an 8-megapixel camera, and it’s reasonably impressive. Low-light shots had low levels of noise and plenty of detail considering the phone’s price. Daylight shots were trickier to judge. On the one hand, they were sharp and detailed with little noise, and we were impressed by the camera’s ability to capture colours accurately. On the other, the photos were definitely overexposed, with light areas blowing out and no detail in the sky. Overexposure is a common issue with smartphone cameras, and despite this problem the Desire 500’s camera remains above average.

No problems in low-light for the camera

Daylight shots are detailed but overexposed in parts

Aside from the lack of a compass, we like the HTC Desire 500. It’s a great-looking phone that shows you don’t need to buy a tedious black slab if you have less than £250 to spend on an Android smartphone. It also has a reasonable screen and good camera, and acceptable performance. However, it struggles to compete with the Motorola Moto G.

Surprisingly, prices have remained more or less constant since launch. Tracking down a SIM free phone is still around £210 from Handtec, while the Moto G is only £115 SIM free from Phones4U, or £99 on O2 pre-pay.

With these prices, the Desire 500 simply can’t compete with the quicker and longer-lasting Moto G, but if you’re dead set against paying for a phone upfront and you want a better camera, then Three might have an answer for you. At the time of writing, it’s currently offering a great contract deal on the Desire 500, giving you 1GB of data, 300 minutes and unlimited texts for just £15 per month.

The Moto G, on the other hand, is generally more expensive on contract and you don’t get such a good deal. The best we could find was on O2, which gives you 500MB of data, 500 minutes and unlimited texts for £19 per month.

However, in this case, we still think the Moto G is worth the extra expense, particularly when, if you buy the phone upfront, you can get a £10 giffgaff goody bag of 500 minutes, unlimited texts and 1GB of data for £10 a month and it doesn’t tie you in to a 24-month contract either.