HTC Desire

About HTC Desire

Desire is one of the oldest surviving names in Android. It has been on HTC phones since the early years, when HTC was setting the direction the industry followed, and it is still on them now.

What it means has changed completely. The early Desire phones were among the most desirable Android handsets available. The name now sits on the mid-range and below, on phones sold in far smaller numbers and often into particular regional markets rather than globally.

Both facts are worth having. The history explains why the name is familiar and why people still search for it. The present explains what you would actually be buying.

What is a Desire phone now?

A mid-range Android phone, competing on price and familiarity rather than on distinction.

The line does the ordinary things a phone is bought for. Messaging, calls, navigation, media, a camera that is fine in good light. That covers the great majority of phone use, and a phone that does it reliably at a moderate price is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy.

What it does not do is compete at the front of the market, and it has not for a long time. Expecting otherwise because of what the name meant in 2010 is the main way somebody ends up disappointed by one.

Distribution matters here as much as specification. Several recent HTC models target specific regional markets, so what is available, what it costs and how well it is supported depend heavily on where you are. The line is best assessed as whatever model is actually on sale near you rather than in the abstract.

Is the name worth anything to a buyer?

A little, and it is worth being precise about which part.

Familiarity is genuinely valuable and routinely dismissed. Somebody who has used HTC phones for years knows the software, the settings and the layout, and moving to an unfamiliar manufacturer has a real cost in time and irritation. Staying with what you know is a legitimate reason to choose a phone, and for a mid-range purchase it may be the strongest reason available.

What the name is not worth is any assumption about the product's competitive position. The early Desire phones were market-leading; the current ones are mid-range. Those are separate facts about separate decades, and the brand carries the memory rather than the capability.

The practical version: buy it because the specific phone in front of you is good value and familiar, not because of what the badge used to mean.

Who should buy something else?

Anyone shopping on specification per unit of money. The mid-range is the most competitive part of the phone market and it is contested by manufacturers who compete on very little else. A pure value comparison will usually point elsewhere.

Anyone who needs a long support window. Establish the software update and security patch commitment in writing before buying, and compare it with what the larger manufacturers now publish. A cheaper phone that loses security updates sooner is not actually cheaper, and this applies across the mid-range rather than to this line in particular.

Anyone buying for the camera, for the reasons every page in this range gives: processing decides it, and processing follows investment.

Anyone drawn by the name expecting the phone the name used to describe. That phone was a long time ago.

Anyone interested in what this company is genuinely good at now should look at Vive instead. The virtual reality range is where the current products and the clear direction are.