HARDWARE REVIEW

HTC Desire 530 Review

by Luke Walsh, September 11th, 2016

The HTC Desire 530 is at the starting end of the price table when you compare it to phones such as the previously reviewed HTC One M9. Priced at just £129 the 530 seems to be aiming at the younger generation or the older generation that are just looking for a smart phone at cost price.

At the entry level its features a 5-inch 720p touchscreen, 8MP camera and a 2,200mAh battery, which seems reasonable for the price point of the phone but performance seekers won’t enjoy the Snapdragon 210 processor and 1.5 GB of ram. The HTC Desire 530 will really need to show its true colours in software optimisation to handle the low power output.

Design

The HTC Desire 530 is a nice size and is contained inside a single mold of plastic around the 5-inch screen. For a screen size of that size and the build, it is comfortable to hold in your hand and you’ll find the speakers holes at both the top and bottom which is quite common for a HTC device. Top left, above the screen is the front facing camera as well as a standard 3.5mm headphone jack with your micro usb at the bottom of the device.

On left side of the phone is home to the plastic flap which holds the sim card and the additional microSD slot to increase the overall memory. Over at the opposite side of the phone is the volume controls and a strangely massive plastic red button which acts as the on/off button, it is incredibly garish and downright ugly. Why the designers thought it would be a good idea to make something that red and not just follow the overall colour scheme of the phone and keep it black/grey is a mystery.

The review unit that we were given comes in the standard dark grey and is also available in white but they are not anything great to look at. Purchasing the phone does give you the option to select their Micro Splash design which is promoted to make no two phones the same with the back of the phone each having a unique pattern. This design does further suggest that HTC are trying to target the younger end of the market who won’t necessarily have lots of spare cash but want a phone that stands out from the usual aesthetic composition. If you do get stuck with the dull grey or plain white, there is also the snap cases which offer more designs like the Micro Splash but in multiple colour options.

Continuing with the back of the phone in the top left hand side of the device is the 8MP camera and flash, the camera has a thick lip which stands out from the rest of the phone and will be the first thing to touch the desk or collect dirt. There is also a slot for a lanyard at the bottom if you like having your phone around your neck, a design idea which might be useful to some but does beg to question if anyone uses it now in 2016. Again the younger generation might find this useful, or if you are stuck in the 90’s.

Sizing up the phone it weighs 140g which is quite light for a budget phone and is due to all the plastic (over the metal types), from a thickness point of view the Desire 530 is around 8.3mm which is quite good compared to other budget smartphones. Combined together it makes a phone which is nice and light while being easy to hold during one-handed operation, and is useful for those without extra long fingers to reach the whole display.

Turning on the phone you’ll get a first glance at the 1280×720 display and by surprise it is not as bad as you think when you compare to hearing “Retina this” and “ultra HD that”. On a 5 inch screen, it looks quite sharp, the biggest issue is with the display’s brightness,. Wacking it up to full seems like it is at half mast and is never bright enough to use comfortably outside in direct light. The Desire 530 also has a pretty bad viewing angle, when out and about in daylight I was quite often trying to angle the phone away from any light source so I could see what was on the screen. If you are someone who is outside a lot, the Desire won’t do you justice in natural light and is frustrating that the brightness slider looks like it is lying to you and holding out on more lumens.

Performance

An 8MP camera and 5 inch screen you’ll definitely think of considering the Desire 530 as your new phone, but even for a budget handset for around £130 there are some things to consider and it mainly boils down to the overall performance of the device.

I tested the phone when using it for day to day tasks such as browsing the internet and also played a popular mobile MOBA called Vainglory.

Inside 530 is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor and is the budget version of processors for the smartphone market, with a clock speed of up to 1.1ghz and quad core it is noticeably slow even if it looks good on paper.

To further add a technical nail into the smartphones coffin, it only comes with 1.5GB of RAM which is painfully low for any smartphone these days.

To choose a phone based on budget the competition is still something people are going to factor in, “Can I get better for the same money” and this is where the HTC Desire 530 just does not measure up.

When testing the phone using GeekBench 3 it got consistently low scores, from a single core and multi-core perspective it is probably one of the slowest phones I have ever looked at and when comparing benchmarks to other phones. Even when comparing it to the high-end devices you can see the massive difference in power the CPU is able to offer, which massively lets it down.

Looking at similar phones at a closer price point, they still manage over double the performance score. Comparing the Honor 5x with the HTC Desire, the phone was able to give a single core score at 694 for only an extra £40-50. Compare it to the old Galaxy Note (priced at £99) and that still gets a single core score of 450 on GeekBench. If you are looking at a budget phone but still want to play some higher-end mobile games or multitask, the Desire 530 will probably show its performance losses with slowdown.

Testing the phone with some mobile games, I used Vainglory as my baseline to see how it could handle some high octane PvP action. Vainglory to its credit did a fantastic job of accommodating the phones low resources, the phone was able to for the most part play Vainglory quite well but did get uncomfortably warm after about 5 minutes. During the match when there is a lot happening on the screen at one, the Desire 530 started to stagger and would freeze every few seconds making last hit kills almost impossible. Switch over to Candy Crush as the phone was able to handle it a lot better, due to the nature of the game, Candy Crush never really pushed the phone in the same way but there was one or two occasions where the menu navigation seemed a little off. Much like VainGlory the phone kept quite a temperature when playing any game and would be something that could warrant a phone case to separate your hands from the heat (but would probably make things hotter). Even moving away from the tests, when using the phone you could clearly see it was struggling. When navigating through the phones menu I noticed far to often it stuttering.

Software

The Desire 530 runs Android based system Marshmellow with HTC’s custom OS on top of it, Sense. Marshmallow is probably one of the best operating systems available at the moment and it a good inclusion into the Desire 530, it comes packed with a range of features including a set of privacy controls and battery saving options.

Having a custom OS on top of the base Android platform, there is a worry that it was bloat the system and be filled with unnecessary applications and further decrease what little resources the 530 has. Luckily much like the One M9’s OS, Sense runs really well on devices and is one of few options out there that is good without bogging down the phone.

One of the most noticeable features in Sense is the Blinkfeed which acts as a news aggregator for you phone, which is accessed by swiping right from the home screen. It can contain information from news channels as well as your social media for it to be conveniently all in one place to search through. Depending on how much you bring into Blinkfeed, it can show quite a lot from different sources all at once, diminishing the personalised feel it is meant to set out to achieve.

The Sense Theme Store is another nice little addition to the software as it allows you to personalise the design to meet your needs, it’s packed with a load of different preset options or you can create you own. If you have the Micro Splash design on the back of your phone, it can further add to the unique touch of your handset.

Using the phone during the day, I probably got around a day’s use from a full charge on the 2200mAh battery, which is to be expected. This included listening to music, browsing the internet and using social media throughout the day, from a battery life point of view it does exactly what it should and lasts the normal time anyone with a phone is used to these days. Coming back to playing games, due to pushing the phone quite hard and the heat, battery life drains quicker than I thought when compared to my normal phone, the M9.

Camera

Camera’s on budget phones have seen a massive improvement over the last year or so and was something usually written off, being the easiest way to reduce the cost of a phone by throwing in a bad camera. With the HTC Desire 530, the camera was both acceptable and a little disappointing.

The 8MP camera has a f/2.4 aperture lens which means in regular natural light the photos come out quite nice and sharp with a decent colour, but the image quality is not the best compared to other phones in its price range. It has further problems in low-light situations and did not work very well in environments that have multiple light sources making the images come out poorly coloured and grainy.

Using the camera, I saw another instance of the stretched resources with the camera app not taking kindly to trying to use the other options such as the panorama mode, and when pressing the shutter button there was sometimes a big delay between pressing it and the response to take a photo.

The front facing camera which is only 5MP suffers from the same sort of problems with lighting and shutter speeds, making it difficult to use and rarely getting any decent selfies that you’d want to put on social media, sorry young ones.

Sound

HTC have once again included their Boomsound speaker software into the HTC Desire 530, but it does not actually include the same dual speaker set up that some of the other higher end HTC phones have in them. Even though the phone looks like it includes two speakers, one on the top and the other on the bottom, it actually has just one located at the bottom.

Smartphones are usually not the tech of choice if you want, nice, crisp and bassy audio because when turned up even on remotely high volume they can sound distorted and always lack substance on the lower end frequencies. The HTC Desire 530 won’t win you any awards for audio quality and with only one speaker it won’t be blasting out loud drum and bass tunes.

When calling though, the internal speaker is better, coming in clearly and being a reasonable volume in an office situation, out in busy areas however, it was a little harder to hear what the person on the other end was saying. The microphone did how I expected it to do sounding clear, with some tendencies to pick up a little too much background noise.

Budget phones used to be exactly what they were, smartphones on a very tight constraints for features and performance. Nowadays, you can pick up a reasonable phone for £150-200 but the HTC Desire 530 does not fall into this category as the Snapdragon processor just does not pack enough punch for a smooth experience, which ruins the user experience even at £130. It does look to part with a decent build quality, a good OS and the Micro Splash design makes it very attractive but with other phones on the market offering more, it will be hard to choose the Desire 530 over other budget phones which are better performance wise.