HTC Desire 601 Review

Introduction

HTC is slowly building an army of mid-range smartphones, and the Desire 601 is one of the newest officers in its ranks. With a 4.5” qHD display, Snapdragon 400 SoC and a 5 MP camera, the HTC Desire 601 is definitely not going to scare away the opposing armies on its own, but who knows, it might prove to be quite useful in the greater scheme of things.

What's interesting about the HTC Desire 601 is that it'll serve as a good indication of where the Android mid-range market is going these days. Wonder how much value you're going to get out of an Android mid-ranger? Let's find out!

Design

If you tend to enjoy that rubbery soft-touch coating that HTC uses on some of its mainstream smartphones, you'll love the Desire 601, because it'll give you just that. It's very, very soft-touch. Some of us here at PhoneArena like it, other don't, so we guess it's just a matter of personal preference. Size-wise, the Desire 601 feels quite compact (5.30 x 2.63 x 0.39 inches) – it's very narrow and can be easily held and used with one hand-only. If we have to comment on the actual appearance of the handset, we'd say that the black version is quite boring, while the white one seems fine and has more of an 'HTC One' kind of look (though it's far from the flagship's class). There's also a more 'aggressive' red version, but if we had to pick one, we'd have gone for the white Desire 601.

The buttons around the sides of the phone function quite well and are easy to press. Overall, the phone is well made and doesn't feel too cheap. It doesn't blow us away with anything, but it's OK.

Display

A nicely-sized 4.5" screen is what the Desire 601 owns, so it's neither small, nor too big. Unfortunately, the resolution of the panel is just 540x960 pixels, which has lead to the so-so pixel density of 245 ppi. Legibility will hardly be an issue with this display, but it sure is somewhat pixelized.

As far as color balance goes, the Desire 601 treats us to some quite cold visuals, with a dominiant blue that makes things on screen appear somewhat cooler (as in colder) than they should be. Thankfully, though, the maximum brightness of the screen reaches about 500 nits, resulting in a pretty good outdoor visibility. The viewing angles of this IPS LCD screen are also quite decent.

Interface and Functionality

It looks like HTC really enjoys the Sense 5 UI that debuted on the One, as it's been used on pretty much every smartphone the company has produced since then, including the Desire 601. Here, Sense 5 is running on top of Android 4.2.2, so you have a relatively up-to-date version of Android.

To the leftmost end of the screen, you'll find the so-called BlinkFeed, which aggregates various types of content like news, your calendar appointments, social updates, etc. It's a fine feature, but unfortunately, there's no option to turn it off if you want a more stockish experience. Other than BlinkFeed, the rest of the homescreen interface is your standard affair. You can have multiple pages used for app shortcuts and widgets.

As you probably know, HTC Sense 5 is a pretty extensive UI, changing the look and functionality of most built-in applications, including the dialer, messaging and organizer tools. All in all, we like HTC's custom user interface and think that it's among the most polished and unique ones out there. There are some small inconveniences – for example, adding icons and widgets to the home screen is unnecessarily complicated, but those things don't ruin the overall positive impression.

Processor and Memory

The Desire 601 is powered by the Snapdragon 400 chipset, which features a dual-core Krait CPU at 1.4 GHz and the Adreno 305 GPU. While this CPU-GPU combination may not sound particularly enticing, we're glad that the system itself manages to move at a steady pace, without much lag. The might be a slight hiccup here and there, but on the whole, it's a satisfying and smooth experience.

Camera

The Desire 601 might have a 5 MP, which is more than the One's 4 MP camera, but the sensor's pixels aren't of the "Ultra" size as on the One, so this here's just a basic 5 MP snapper with a relatively wide aperture of f/2.0 and a BSI (backside illuminated) sensor.

Sadly, HTC is yet to change its camera app interface, which works, but isn't particularly comfortable to use. That's so because all of the settings are stuffed inside a small pop-up window on the screen and you usually need to do a lot of scrolling up and down in order to find what you need. Other than that, it's a versatile app, which lets you take advantage of difference scene modes, HDR, anti-shake option and so on and so forth. There is no continuous autofocus, though; instead, you can use the tap-to-focus gesture to change the focus while shooting a video.



So, we weren't lying when we said that this is a basic snapper. Photos often come out overly sharp and totally lacking in detail. Colors are, for the most part, realistic, though they do tend to appear just a bit warmer than they should (meaning there's a bit more red). Dynamics aren't very good as well, with some well-lit areas easily ending up overexposed.

Indoors, where there isn't plenty of light, noise starts to be an issue, especially due to the relatively high sharpness of the images. Still, colors manage to remain natural, so the situation isn't all that bad. The LED flash isn't anything to write home about – when you're using it, colors do get strangely altered, but at least... you know, it's there if you happen to need some extra light.



The HTC Desire 601 is capable of recording 1080p video at a relatively smooth frame rate of about 27 fps. Despite the high resolution, however, the video doesn't really look very good, and is suffering from the same issues as the photos – lack of details, sharpened image and noise.

Having in mind this is a mid-range handset, the camera is passable; however, we feel that HTC should start to equip even its lower-tier phones, like the Desire 601, with something better than this, because the photos and the footage clearly aren't good.

Call quality

The quality of the sound while making calls with the HTC Desire 601 is mediocre. The earpiece is fine for the most part – it has a strong output and average quality, but the microphone does a somewhat poor job at transmitting your voice to the other end of the line, where it appears a bit unclear.

As we said, the loudspeakers aren't as wonderful as they are on the HTC One, but they are still more than sufficient for calls, thanks to their loudness and decent sounding.

Battery

Equipped with a 2100 mAh battery unit, the Desire 601 will offer you decent battery life. The statistics provided by the manufacturer claim that 3G talk-time should be around 13 hours, while 3G stand-by time is around 18 days – which are both average results.