The IT Nerd

Rogers this week hooked me up with the HTC Desire 510. It’s an Android smartphone that as you will see comes with enough power for most for not a lot of money. From a size perspective, it’s pretty easy to hold and it will not slip out of your hand. The one that Rogers sent me was white so fingerprints were covered up everywhere except the screen. Speaking of the screen, it’s a 4.7-inch, 854-by-480-pixel TFT LCD. I found that the viewing angle is too narrow, and even from dead on, everything looks a bit washed out and grainy. Maximum brightness is average, which makes the highly reflective screen even more of an issue outdoors. In terms of the rest of the phone, the volume buttons are on the right edge, while the Power button is positioned on the top left corner, making it a pain to reach with one hand. The back peels off to reveal a microSD card slot and removable battery. Strangely, the speaker is on the back rather than the front which I would expect to find it on an HTC phone.

In terms of specs, here’s what’s under the hood:

Performance with this setup is decent. You won’t set the wold on fire, but you won’t feel that the Desire 510 is slow. In short, it’s performance is acceptable. HTC’s Sense 6 skin runs atop Android 4.4 with a spattering of custom apps for Gallery, Music, and Videos. The BlinkFeed social and news aggregator is still enabled by default, but you can easily remove it if you want. Rogers has added a few apps of their own including Rogers Anyplace TV, Rogers One Number, and City TV Video. Speaking of Rogers, this phone achieved 34.05 downstream and 5.96 upstream on the Rogers LTE network when I tested it with the Speediest.net app.

In terms of the camera, at the back you get at 5MP shooter that does 1080P video. Up front, you get a 0.3 MP camera for selfies and video conferences. To test the rear camera, I took a trip to Pearson Airport in Toronto. First, let’s look at the still picture. Click on them to see it in full resolution:

The image quality isn’t bad given that it’s 5MP. Now the video. Set it to full screen and 1080p:

The video quality is decent. I don’t think anyone will complain. Though I will note that there was only a slight breeze and the microphone was overwhelmed by it. In terms of battery life, you’ll get almost a day and a half out of it. More if you use the power saving modes that come with the phone. Either way, that’s very good. In terms of price, Rogers is offering the HTC Desire 510 for $0 on a two year term or $200 outright. At that price point, it’s a good choice for someone who wants their first smartphone, or doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on a smartphone.

This entry was posted on November 3, 2014 at 7:00 am and is filed under Products with tags HTC, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.