HTC Desire 600 Review

Introduction:

With a spacious 4.5-inch display, amazing sound quality and HTC’s latest Sense 5.0 Android interface, the mid-range HTC Desire 600 offers a lot of the features of the HTC One at a slightly more affordable price. It also comes in a dual SIM version of a fairly rare kind - one that supports both your SIM cards simultaneously active.

The HTC Desire 600 however is not cheap and it lacks the powerful Snapdragon 600 chip and UltraPixel camera of the One. Sounds like a mixed bag? It is, indeed, a handset of compromise, read on to better understand all its pros and cons, and ultimately decide - is this the handset for you?

In the box:

• microUSB to USB cable
• Wall charger
• Headphones
• User Manual

Design:

Thin and relatively compact, the Desire 600 nestles comfortably in the palm of your hand. That is mostly because of HTC’s selection of a spacious, but not too large 4.5-inch display, so the overall size of the device feels just right. It’s put together solidly, with no moving or screaking parts and slips in a pocket just as easily as it nestles in the hand. The phone is relatively thin at 9.3mm and light as it weighs just 130 grams.




Covered in glossy plastic, the back of the Desire 600 feels a bit cheap and picks up fingerprints and scratches easily. The whole phone is a mixture of elements. Apart from the plastic back, there is a silver strip of brushed aluminum that encircles the phone and a pair of bright red speakers on the front. If you like a splash of color on your device, you’d like the Desire 600.



As much as we like its compact size, the phone still is a bit long and having the lock button on top makes it a stretch to reach. The volume rocker is on the right and much easier to access. All physical buttons have nice travel to them.

Interface and Functionality:

The HTC Desire 600 runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with HTC’s latest Sense 5.0 skin on top of it. Overall, Sense 5.0 comes with cleaner, less cluttered looks. Yet, it retains some remnants from the past. The charcoal colored interface throughout reminds us of times past and not of the modern Android Holo design language.

Liking the skin or not mostly depends on the added features, though. Here we have HTC’s BlinkFeed, a tile-based news and social feed aggregator, HTC’s own music, calendar and notes apps, and HTC’s awesome gallery with automatic 30-second highlights reels. Of all those, the gallery feels least like a gimmick, and we absolutely love how the phone automatically creates a 30-second video highlight out of your photos and videos, and adds sound to it.



Navigating around the phonebook is all based on swiping left or right, and HTC has even added some animations as you flip between your history, phonepad, favorites, people and groups tabs. The contact book itself is rich in content as you can see the most recent updates and images for each contact. The phonebook app however is all painted in the charcoal color theme that looks a bit dull to us.

Camera:

Unlike the HTC One, the Desire 600 does not feature an UltraPixel camera. Instead it uses a regular 8-megapixel auto-focus main camera with a single LED flash and a 1.6-megapixel front facing shooter.

The camera interface is the same as on the HTC One. It’s rich in options with tens of different photo filters, an HDR and panorama options, and you can tweak all sorts of settings like ISO, white balance and self-timer. The camera launches fairly quickly and the handset locks focus pretty rapidly.


The actual quality of the images is slightly below average. Its main drawback is due to the rather unrealistic, unsaturated colors, giving that dull look with a noticeably yellow tint. The amount of captured detail is average, good enough for Facebook sharing but not for anything more. In low-light conditions the quality of the images drops to even worse as noise creeps in. The single LED flash is too weak to properly light things up even when the objects you shoot are pretty close.



Video recording maxes out at 720p at 24 frames per second. It suffers from the same issues as photographs including the yellowish colors and mediocre details.

We expected more from the Desire 600 camera. Its performance is average at best and often times way below that - a sad fact for a phone that is not all that cheap.





Multimedia:

Back on a positive note, not only does the phone come with a 4.5-inch display that is bright and vivid, great for media consumption, it also features BoomSound stereo speakers on the front, similar to the ones on the HTC One. Sound output is one level above all other handsets - rich, deep, not the usual tinny sound coming from a smartphone. Admittedly, it is one notch below the HTC One, but still very comparable.

The awesome stereo speakers are a great asset for music lovers. Since we not only play MP3 and radio, but also watch tons of YouTube videos and just various media content on the web, sound quality is of paramount importance and we wish other manufacturers paid as much attention to this as HTC.

There are two music applications - the stock Android one and HTC’s custom made app that breaks down your music collection into artists, albums, songs, playlists, genres, podcasts and even folders. It’s an awesome application and uses Beats Audio enhancements for deeper bass output.



The handset plays back MPEG, AVI and Xvid movies at 720p with ease, but DivX and MOV files are not supported out of the box, and MKV playback is laggy.

Call Quality:

We talk a lot on our phones, but a dual SIM handsets usually suggests even more of your time spent by the earpiece, and that’s why call quality is of paramount importance. The Desire 600 has a loud earpiece so you’d be able to hear your callers easily in noisier environments. On our end of the line voices sound just a bit muffled, but otherwise okay. Our callers - on the other side - reported hearing our voice loud and clear. The phone comes with only a single microphone on the bottom, so no fancy noise cancellation technology is employed here.

Battery life:

Peeling the glossy back cover, reveals the HTC Desire 600’s Ferrari red undergarments and a user replaceable 1860mAh battery. Talk time is about average at 11.4 hours and an average user would get around a day and a half of battery life on a single charge.

Conclusion:

At a price north of $425 off contract, the HTC Desire 600 is not cheap. It’s more of an upper mid-ranger, facing ferocious Android competition. The 4.3-inch dual-SIM Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini comes to mind as a better overall alternative or if you want a bigger display, the Samsung Galaxy Grand can offer that. The Acer Liquid E2 is another great option that might not look as good, but features a powerful quad-core chip and a better camera at a lower price. And if you're not specifically looking for a dual-SIM phone, the Huawei Ascend P6 and Alcatel Touch Idol Ultra are as sleek and stylish mid-range alternatives.

As we said in the beginning, the HTC Desire 600 is all about compromise. Compromise between a good vivid display and rather slow performance, a rich sound and sub-par camera. Compared to other single SIM handsets out there those could be fatal flaws, but given its unique dual SIM card support, the Desire 600 reserves a somewhat unique place where we can forgive its flaws. Will you do the same?