[Review] HTC Desire 700: Good Sound And Voice Clarity, But For A Price

Lately, HTC has become really aggressive in the market. They recently came out with 3 new Desire series of phones, out of which we got to use the Desire 700 first. And here is what this new phone is all about.

Design
HTC has made some brilliant designs recently in the form of ONE and ONE Max, which made you instantly fall in love with them. However, HTC Desire 700 is not one of those. You fall in love with it gradually. At first, we found it like any other android phone, but once we started using it, it turned out to be quite nice. For instance, the matte finish rear is really nice to hold and does not let the phone slip away from your palm.

The camera placement at back is better for taking pictures, as your fingers do not come in the way. The large 5-inch touchscreen is nice too. The body is all black with a dash of green on the speaker grills and on the rear camera ring. The power and volume buttons located on the top and side are well within reach as well.

Performance
HTC has given the Desire 700 a decent configuration and the overall package is nice. For its heart the phone has a 1.2 GHz Quad-core processor. This is accompanied with 1GB RAM and 8GB internal storage, which can be expanded by 64GB using a microSD card. Desire 700 can accommodate two SIM cards in it; this makes it a neat buy for people who use two mobile connections.

While the rear camera has an 8MP sensor, the front one has a 2.1 MP to take selfies and to video chat. The 5-inch touchscreen is brilliant and quite bright. The colours are vivid and do not wash away under the sun or bright light. On the other side, it supports 540 x 960 pixel resolution that is low for a phone with this screen size. A better HD resolution would have been preferred. On the Quadrant Android phone test, this phone scored over 3,400 points, which indicates not extreme, but decent performance. As far as sound is concerned Desire 700 has twin speakers with amplifier.

User Interface
Now, here is where all the magic happens. The usual range of desire phones has the HTC Sense user interface version 4.5, however, the Desire 700 has what its elder brother (HTC ONE) has – Sense version 5. Users get Blink Feed, which brings latest news from various feeds such as Business Insider and your social accounts under one scroll. This is also your default home screen, but you can swipe right and come to a stock Android-like home screen where widgets and app shortcuts can be added.

People who have used Sense 5 UI before will feel at home. The new interface has picked up some good things from iOS OS too. You can club applications together in one tile just like the way one could in iOS 6 and 7. HTC Zoe comes to this phone as well. With this app users can take 20 burst shots and 3 seconds video to bring pictures to life. Something like the newspaper image effect you saw in the Harry Potter movies.

Verdict
All in all, we quite like the phone. It gave us almost a day of usage in 3G network (under nominal use). The voice clarity is superb and we loved the nice sound experience that came from the stereo loudspeakers on it. Movies and games do come to life on this phone; however we were not ecstatic with the shots the rear camera could take. Day shots are good but lose quality in low light. Also, the phone is a bit heavy and one would want to pay a little less. If HTC had kept the price lower than what it is now, the Desire 700 would have been the best phone around the 25K bracket. Right now to get your hands on this handset, you would need to shell out Rs 30,100.