A smartphone called Desire
HTC's latest smartphone comes with an excellent camera and music player
A new mid-range smartphone with good performance, a quality camera and an equally quality music player, the HTC Desire 500 is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor running at 1.2GHz. It runs on the Android 4.1.2 operating system with the Sense 5.0 user interface enhancing ease of use and functions.
The phone boasts a 4.3-inch touch screen with 480 x 800 pixel resolution and 1 gigabyte of active memory or RAM and comes with 4 GB of storage that can be expanded with a micro SD card of up to 64GB.
Desire 500’s 8 megapixel camera has good performance and captures good quality image thanks to its 1/3.2-inch backside-illuminated image sensor, f/2.0 28-mm equivalent lens and a dedicated HTC ImageChip. The test found it really captured beautiful and clean pictures.
Among other things, you will enjoy Desire 500’s multi-shot burst mode that prevents you from losing crucial moments. And its VideoPic setting allows you to capture both videos and pictures at the same time.
It also comes with an Automatic Video Highlights function that automatically selects the highlights of an event for creating a 30-second show. You can choose one of five music themes and the image sequence you want and then share the video on your Facebook wall.
HTC Desire 500 can also functions as a very good quality MP3 player thanks to the built-in Beats Audio. I enjoyed listening to music with Desire 500 for hours.
A feature that I liked very much is HTC BlinkFeed. This transforms the Desire 500’s home screen into a customisable stream of live information that combines social streams and news and allows you to stay updated all the time if you are online either with 3G or Wi-Fi connection.
BlinkFeed can fetch information from both local and global content from more than 2,000 media sources. It currently links to more than 10,000 articles per day from some of the world’s leading media companies including AOL, ESPN, MTV, The Financial Times and Reuters.
The home screen looks great and is very informative with lots of news photos and headlines. You can tap on each photo or headline to bring up the report for reading. After you have logged on to your Facebook account, your Facebook feeds will be blended with the news headlines.
Unfortunately, the Desire 500 does not support my TrueMove H’s 850 MHz HSPA+ account so I had to test it on Wi-Fi connection only.
It performed well and fast and the Wi-Fi connection had no problem. Menus and the touch screen were very responsive.
The HTC Desire 500 retails for Bt8,990.
Key specs:
_ Network: 2G/ 2.5G - GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 900/1800/1900 MHz; 3G/ 3.5G - UMTS/ HSPA: 900/2100 MHz
_ Platform: Android 4.1.2 with HTC Sense 5.0
_ CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 200, 1.2GHz, quad-core
_ Memory: 1 GB DDR2 RAM
_ Storage: 4 GB, expandable with microSD card
_ Display: 4.3-inch LCD with 480 x 800 pixel resolution
_ Camera: 8 MP BSI sensor with f/2.0 aperture and 28 mm lens; Front Camera: 1.6 MP with BSI sensor
_ Connectivity: 3.5 mm stereo audio jack, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA
_ Sensors: Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor
_ Battery: 1800 mAh removable rechargeable Li-polymer battery
_ Dimension: 131.8 x 66.9 x 9.9mm
_ Weight: 123 g
