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HTC Desire 826 hands-on

By John Velasco

Updated: Jan 06, 2015, 9:44 AM

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The HTC Desire 826 was just announced, bringing another 64-bit enabled midranger to the table. This one comes with the “proper” operating system to boot – the Desire 826 is pre-loaded with Android 5.0 Lollipop, although it is dressed in the company's proprietary Sense UI. Upon first look, the HTC Desire design language is instantly recognizable, with just a few very minor tweaks and updates. Let's have a look.

Design

The HTC Desire 826 reminds us a lot of the 820's design language, mixed with a splash of Desire EYE. It is mostly made of glossy plastic, adorned with some subtle color accents – a modernistic look, which seems to be becoming a signature of the Desire series. The sides of the 826 have a rubbery texture, which should provide for a better grip of its not-so-small body. This handset is also equipped with HTC's BoomSound speakers, which are hidden in thin lines where the display panel meets the top and bottom bezels – much like how HTC did with the Desire EYE.

Display

The display is still a 5.5" display, but the Desire 826 one-ups the Desire 820 by upping the resolution to 1080 x 1920 pixels, which gives it a nice dense ratio of 401 PPI. It offers a sharp image, nice, wide viewing angles, and is surrounded by rather thick bezels by today's standards.

Interface

HTC's snappy Sense interface makes a return, but this time around – it adorns Android 5.0 Lollipop, which makes the Desire 826 HTC's first midranger to come with Google's newest OS out of the box. On first glance – the Sense UI doesn't seem to look very different from anything we've seen so far.

Processor and Memory

The Desire 826 is powered by the 64-bit, octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, clocked at 1.7 GHz, and paired with 2 GB of RAM. Now, we've encountered this SoC before, as it also powers the Desire 820 – a nice and powerful CPU, which provides a snappy performance – we are truly curious how it would perform under extensive testing on a phone with Android 5.0 Lollipop.

The phone's internal memory is 16 GB and it supports microSD, microSDHC, and microSDXC cards of up to 128 GB.

Camera

The main camera has a 13 MP resolution sensor, keeping in check with HTC's strides towards enabling and encouraging users to take more high-quality photos. If the sensor is the same as the one in the Desire 820, we'd expect some very satisfying results. The frontal snapper is a 4 MP UltraPixel camera. Yup, the tech that HTC tried to cram in not one, but two of its One (M7 and M8) models' main cameras, and which is rumored to be absent from the upcoming 2015 flagship, is making a return as a selfie-cam. This could actually turn out well, as frontal cams often need better light-siphoning abilities, and HTC's UltraPixel tech was invented with just that in mind.

Expectations

A slightly upgraded Desire 820, with a crisper display, a different type of frontal cam, and a slightly sleeker design with its hidden speaker grilles and rubbery bezels, the Desire 826 doesn't seem to offer specs that are notably better than its sibling, however, if one were on the market for a new HTC midranger right now, we could see how the newest offering could be more attractive.

Unfortunately, the only thing we know about the handset's launch is that it will be hitting stores in China soon. This doesn't mean that it will not be available in the US, though, there is not word on if or when. We also don't have official information on price, but seeing as the Desire 820 was priced at $475 (off-contract), we'd imagine that the price of the HTC Desire 826 would be in the ballpark, if not slightly above.