?WHAT IS THE HTC DESIRE 530
2015 wasn’t a great year for HTC phones. While the company’s flagship HTC One A9 smartphone looked great, it was overpriced and offered middle-of-the-road hardware. Then the company disappointed everyone by not unveiling the HTC One M10 at MWC
So you could be forgiven for missing the arrival of the Desire 530. It's a phone that, on paper at least, has the potential to be one of 2016 best affordable smartphones – although its UK price hasn't yet been confirmed
Its standout design feature is its 'Micro Splash' finish, which is created using nozzles that spray paint at various pressures and different thicknesses at the back of the phone. As a result, HTC claims each Desire 530 is unique
HTC DESIRE 530 – DESIGN
As budget phones go, the Desire 530 genuinely feels like it's been designed with care. The phone looks like a stripped-down version of HTC’s selfie specialist, the Desire Eye, which is no bad thing
During my initial hands-on with the Desire 530 at the MWC show, I was a big fan of the Micro Splash finish, as it made the white model I tested look like a Jackson Pollock painting. Curiously, the model HTC sent me for review was the one edition that doesn't get the Micro Splash treatment, instead being a fairly dull grey. It still feels good to hold, but it doesn't have that visual 'wow' factor that the splashed models create
The inclusion of a lanyard slot is another unique design feature. For those who missed the boat, lanyards were a fashion accessory that could be seen on many '90s school kids' Nokia 3230s. They’re basically bits of shoelace that let you connect the phone to your wrist – making it harder to lose
HTC claims the lanyards will prove a hit with younger buyers looking to accessorise their phone, and while this might be a stretched claim, I can see the feature being useful for people who use their phone to capture photos in crowds at festivals or sports events, where the chance of an accidental drop is high
HTC is also offering a range of 'snap cases' for people who want to further customise their phone. The snap cases have the same Micro Splash finish as the Desire 530, but offer a more varied number of colour options. If you're unfortunate enough to end up with the plain grey version, this could be a great substitution
Interesting design features aside, the Desire 530 is fairly well built – by budget handset standards, at least. The plastic undeniably looks a little drab without its speckled finish, but it's more than solid enough to survive the odd accidental drop. The grey unit I tested came out of an encounter with my flat’s stairwell without so much as a scratch
With a 5-inch screen, it also hits the same size sweet spot as the Nexus 5X, which makes it one of the few small-hand-friendly smartphones on the market. Overall, it's a lovely device to hold, if not to use
The phone comes equipped with a microSD and Nano SIM slot. The inclusion of a microSD slot is a key positive, as it’ll let you add up to 200GB of extra space to the Desire 530’s 16GB of built-in storage
Thanks to the inclusion of Android Marshmallow’s Adoptable Storage feature, if you're using an SD card that's fast enough, you'll be able to seamlessly expand your storage. The phone automatically assigns where apps and files are stored without any management required on your part
HTC DESIRE 530 – DISPLAY
The Desire 530’s 5.0-inch Super LCD screen is a little less impressive, but reasonable for the money. The specs match the Desire 530’s arch-rival, the Moto G, which is the same size and has an identical 1,280x720-pixel resolution
The Desire 530’s screen is more than sharp enough for regular use. Colours are a little drab for my liking, but there’s also a useful temperature control in the phone’s settings that lets you tweak the screen to meet your preference
The temperature control is a nice touch, but I found a few serious issues that hamper the screen’s overall appeal
For starters, viewing angles aren’t great. Viewed from even slightly off-centre, whites quickly distort and take on various hues including blue, grey and yellow, depending on the angle you view them from
The phone’s maximum brightness is lower than I’d like. Even maxed out the phone looks dull and becomes unusable when hit with even moderately bright light. During my time with the Desire 530, even on grey overcast days in London the phone’s screen regularly became unreadable outdoors
Being fair to HTC these are issues I experience on most affordable smartphones and even 12 months ago I’d have found them forgivable. But with the arrival of handsets such as the Moto G, EE Harrier and Honor 5X, this is no longer the case
By today’s standards the Desire 530’s screen isn’t good enough, even at the budget end of the market
HTC DESIRE 530 – SOFTWARE
The Desire 530 runs using Google’s latest Android Marshmallow operating system overlaid with HTC’s custom Sense skin
Even though Google’s Android N developer preview is now out, Marshmallow's presence should be a key selling point. Android Marshmallow is the best mobile operating system currently available and has a number of nifty features. These include a robust set of application-specific privacy controls, user-friendly Material Design and a decent portfolio of battery-saving services
However, initially I was concerned the Sense Skin may hamper the OS's overall appeal. I’ve never been a fan of Android skins for a variety of reasons – chief of which is their tendency to add bloatware to Android
Luckily, once I started playing with the Desire 530, I found my initial concerns, generally, weren’t warranted. As Android skins go, Sense is one of the better options out there. The OS does add some bloatware apps, but generally manages to make positive (or at least inoffensive) changes to the standard Android experience
HTC’s Blinkfeed news aggregator window is the most obvious Sense addition on the Desire 530. Blinkfeed is a custom feature that can be accessed by swiping left from the phone’s home screen
It aims to make it easier for users to keep on top of the daily news by pulling content in which it thinks you’d be interested into a tiled user interface. It doesn't always get these recommendations right and it often pulls in too many stories from too few sources, but as a quick news digest it's perfectly palatable
Sense’s Theme Store is another potentially useful feature. It lets you customise the Desire 530 design to meet your personal preferences. There’s a decent selection of pre-made themes, and you can even make your own themes from scratch, which matches the custom feel of the phone's Micro Splash-painted chassis
HTC DESIRE 530 – PERFORMANCE
The Desire 530’s tweakability is great, but its appeal is hampered by poor performance. Running TrustedReviews’ standard suite of benchmarks, the Desire 530 is easily one of the worst-performing phones I’ve tested
The scores aren’t surprising when you look at the Desire 530’s hardware. The phone runs using a Snapdragon 210 CPU and 1.5GB of RAM
The Snapdragon 210 is a low-end chip that's designed for super-cheap handsets. It may, on paper, look reasonably good, being LTE-ready and quad-core, but the truth is that it doesn’t deliver performance-wise
On the general Geekbench benchmark the Desire 530 ran in with a poor 296 single-core score and 987 multi-core score. Other affordable phones I've tested have scored nearly three times higher on the same test. The £170 Honor 5X, for example, ran in with 694 single-core and 3,016 multi-core Geekbench scores
The Desire 530’s performance on the gaming-focused 3DMark tests was similarly underwhelming. Running 3DMark’s IceStorm Extreme benchmark the Desire 530 scored 4,162. This is close to half what I’d expect a budget smartphone to score
It wasn't just synthetic benchmarks where this phone struggled: using it as my regular phone was a frustrating experience. While video streaming over Wi-Fi and 4G was generally smooth, on too many occasions the phone inexplicably stuttered when navigating between menu screens
Games such as Riptide GP2 also suffered from performance issues and in general the phone feels too slow by today’s standards. Even opening applications took multiple seconds longer than I’d like
HTC DESIRE 530 – CAMERA
Up until the 2015 edition of the Moto G I generally didn’t expect much from affordable smartphones in the camera department. But in today’s budget smartphone market, camera tech is an increasingly important area, and many sub-£200 smartphones can now offer genuinely impressive photo performance
Here again I found the Desire 530 to be slightly disappointing
The 8-megapixel camera’s f/2.4-aperture lens ensures shots taken on the Desire 530 in regular light are suitably sharp and have good enough colour balance to be shared on social media. But image quality is nowhere near as good as the Moto G’s
The Desire 530 can take reasonable photos
But its shutter lag is terrible
It doesn't deal with low- or mixed-light situations well
Even moderately challenging conditions were too much for it
The Desire 530’s performance issues also severely diminish the phone’s photographic capabilities. On too many occasions I experienced a massive delay between pressing the on-screen shutter button and an image being captured. The slow shutter speed makes shooting anything but a static subject close to impossible.
The processor also struggled to deal with the phone’s panorama shot mode, and my attempts to capture a usable photo for the review proved difficult.
The camera’s autofocus is also fairly finicky. Shooting in anything other than bright light, the Desire 530’s camera struggles to accurately focus.
The Desire 530’s 5-megapixel front camera suffers from the same issues and has equally poor shutter speeds – which again made capturing images on it an awkward experience
HTC DESIRE 530 – BATTERY
Battery life is one area where the Desire 530 meets expectations. I generally managed to get at least a day’s use out of the 2,200mAh battery with regular use. This entailed listening to music on the way to and from work, sporadically attempting to check my messages and social media feeds, streaming an episode of House of Cards via Netflix at lunch, and taking and making a few calls
The phone also deals with battery-intensive tasks reasonably well. Streaming video on popular services such as Netflix and BBC iPlayer, the phone lost an average of 13-16% of its charge per hour. The discharge rate isn’t the best I’ve seen, but it’s also far from the worst. Some of the other affordable handsets I’ve tested lose as much as 20% per hour with video streaming
Normally I’d give you an indication of how much battery the Desire 530 lost with gaming, but sadly the performance problems once again hampered my efforts. Trying to play even moderately demanding titles such as Riptide GP2 on the Desire 530 was such a choppy experience that I never once managed to play for a full hour before losing my patience and pulling out my Pixel C
HTC DESIRE 530 – SOUND AND CALL QUALITY
HTC lists the Desire 530 as featuring its famed Boomsound speaker tech. But don’t be fooled: the phone doesn’t have the same dual-speaker setup seen on more pricy HTC handsets
HTC has designed the phone to look like it has two speakers, but the Desire 530 actually only has one. The mono speaker is housed on the bottom of the phone and doesn’t offer terribly good audio
Like 99% of the smartphones I review, audio lacks low-end oomph and has a tendency to sound tinny and distorted when pushed to even moderately high volumes. If blasting music out of your phone is your thing, then the Desire 530 won’t be for you
Call quality is slightly better, though a little on the quiet side. Taking and making calls around the office the internal speaker and microphone were up to task. But when making calls on London’s busy streets, people on the other end of the line regularly struggled to make out what I was saying
?SHOULD I BUY THE HTC DESIRE 530
A few years ago, when affordable smartphones were 'smart' in name only, the Desire 530 would have been a reasonably decent choice for buyers on a budget
But in today’s world, where consumers are surrounded by great affordable handsets like the Moto G, EE Harrier and BQ Aquaris X5, its low-end specs don’t cut the mustard. The Snapdragon chipset used doesn’t offer adequate performance and comes close to completely ruining the overall user experience. Because of this, I can’t recommend the device, no matter how competitively priced HTC makes it
This is a little sad, as the handset’s Micro Splash finish makes it one of the best-looking affordable smartphones around
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