HTC Desire 500 review

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.