HTC Desire 820 is a colourful, 64-bit Android phone for selfie lovers
The HTC Desire 820 is a 5.5-inch Android phone with a 64-bit processor, an 8-megapixel camera and a fun, colourful design.
- Shortlisted for British Photography Awards 2022, Commended in Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022
The HTC Desire 820 is the latest addition to HTC's Desire 8 series that promise to offer a good all-round mobile experience at an affordable price. It has a decent lineup of specs: a 5.5-inch display, a 64-bit octa-core processor and an 8-megapixel front camera.
It will be available later this month, but HTC is yet to say officially where the phone will be on sale or how much it will cost.
At its launch, HTC focused heavily on the design of the 820. It's only 7.7mm thick, making it a very slim phone, and it weighs only 155g (5.5 ounces). At 158mm long and 79mm wide, it may be too big to use in one hand however.
Its two-tone unibody design is available in a range of bright colours, each of which have different coloured accents around the buttons, edging and camera lens. I think it looks really fun -- it's far removed from the serious luxury of the all-metal One M8 .
The phone has the traditional HTC "BoomSound" speakers above and below the display. I doubt they'll give the same amount of oomph as the ones on the One M8, but I'll be happy if they can make my podcasts audible when I'm cooking. The 5.5-inch screen has a 720p display, which is pretty low density. It's running the latest HTC Sense 6 software, which looks much the same as the experience you'll find on the flagship One M8.
8-megapixel selfies
It sports an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, which may be the highest resolution front-facer we've so far seen on a phone. It has various software features including digital makeup and the ability to morph two faces together -- why you'd want to do that wasn't explained. There's a 13-megapixel rear camera too, which HTC reckons is great in low light.
HTC boasted at the launch that the Desire 820 is the first device in the world to ship with Qualcomm's latest 64-bit octa-core processor. It's actually two quad-core processors -- a 1.2GHz quad-core chip and a 1GHz one as well. HTC says this not only lets the phone tackle multitasking more easily, but also futureproofs it for future Android updates like the upcoming Android L.
There's a 2,600mAh battery powering the phone, which HTC reckons will give up to 22 hours of talk time on 3G. That's an extremely ambitious quote and one that I'll be certainly putting to the test in our full review.