HTC’s new Desire phones look truly unique
The Desire 825, 630 and 530 are mid-rangers with custom paint-jobs
Sick of your smartphone looking like everyone else’s? HTC’s new Desire phones could be the solution to your admittedly first-world problems.
Every single phone in the Desire 825, 630 and 530 lines will look unique, thanks to a clever manufacturing process which sprays each one with paint from a continuously changing nozzle. The result is that the phones’ polycarbonate shells all get splattered in a one-of-a-kind way, while further customisation options come in a choice of colour schemes.
Truth be told, the designs aren’t exactly wildly different from each other – no, they’re not be identical, but all will still look like phones you’ve flicked paint at.
Outside of their skins the phones aren’t hugely exciting.
The 825 is the best of them: it gets HTC’s superb BoomSound with Dolby Audio tech and is Hi-Res Audio certified, which is good news for those of us who want more than 160kbps playback quality for our tunes. The 630 gets the same audio skills, but the 530 has to do without.
Screen-wise, the 825 has a 5.5in LCD at a somewhat disappointing 720p resolution, while the 630 and 530 both get 5in/720p displays. The 825 and 630 get Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processors – hardly cutting-edge these days – while the 530 has to make do with the even weedier 210, but on the plus side all three will arrive rocking Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The 825 and 630 appear to have decent cameras: 13MP with f/2.2 (825) or f/2.4 (630) lens and full HD video recording, but we’ll reserve proper judgement on them till we’ve tried them out. The 530’s camera is an 8MP effort, while all three get 5MP front snappers replete with Auto Selfie and Voice Selfie modes. We would make a snarky comment about the latter features, but it seems selfies are here to stay whatever we think, so we won’t bother.
The HTC Desire 530, 630 and 825 will all arrive next month, although it looks as though the 630 won’t be heading for the UK. We’ll update this with prices when we have them.
Marc McLaren
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