HTC Desire 310 Dual SIM Hands-On & First Impressions

HTC has been a rarity when it comes to budget devices, but this time, the company has come up with a very neat budget device that could compete with the Sony Xperia M, Samsung Galaxy Trend and a few others but while making this in a budget range, the company did a lot of compromise with the features. The device comes with a 4.5-inch display and there’s a quad-core processor under the hood, but the performance is not what one would expect from a quad-core powered smartphone.

The Desire 310 is a Dual-SIM smartphone with the 3G connectivity, and under the 4.5-inch screen, there is a FWVGA display with the 480 x 854 pixels screen resolution. The display doesn’t look really bad, and HTC has always been good with the design part as the phone is comfortable to hold with the curvy edges and a large earpiece on the top, speaker grill on the back (which I’m not a fan of, as it limits the sound when you place it on a flat surface for music), the side buttons on the right panel and the MicroUSB and headset slot on the top.

The back cover is removable, and that is what exposes the Dual SIM slots and the slot for MicroSD card for storage expansion. The rear side also has the speaker grill in the bottom, and there’s a camera with no flash support on the top center.

The internal powering of the HTC Desire 310 is by the Mediatek MT6582M chipset, a quad-core processor clocking at 1.3 GHz, and there is 512MB RAM support for the multitasking. For this amount of powering, the performance of the device is not really smooth and you would be seeing quite a noticeable lagging while trying to multitask. The RAM of 512MB doesn’t really provide a good multitasking support, as most of it is already being eaten up by the background apps and OS. The interface though looks very neat and the HTC Blinkfeed is a well known feed system to bring the latest news and interesting content on the home screen.

HTC Desire 310 Dual SIM Interface

Running the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean OS, the Desire 310 has The multiple home screens can be edited with a lot of customization possible, and what a user would be happy about is the less number of pre-installed apps. Apart from the Google Play Services apps, the other important apps which are seen out-of-the-box include Facebook, Polaris Office 5 and WeChat. The notification panel is the same as in most of the other Android devices with the standard notifications and the quick settings section for the quick toggles.

The storage available on the device is around 2GB of which 1.48GB is available for the user to install apps. There is a MicroSD card slot for the storage expansion.

Camera App

Camera in the Desire 310 is the biggest disappointment, as there is a 5-megapixel camera on the rear side, with no Flash support and no option to focus on the object manually, and there is no auto-focus too. The only way you can expect to get a good click is by capturing the photo from a specific distance from the object. For such a quality, HTC has given a 1080p video recording for the same camera, which for sure isn’t going to give a good video quality. Check below for the camera samples, taken with the camera of the HTC Desire 310.

The battery in the HTC Desire 310 dual SIM is 2000 mAh, which is quite a good capacity when compared to what is included to power the device, and the talktime given by the company is around 11 hours on the 3G network.

The Desire 310 is priced at around Rs. 11000 in the Indian market, and for that price point, this is a pretty good smartphone for someone concerned about the brand value more than what is included within the device, because in comparison to this, there are quite a lot of smartphone which have a better camera, although the design of the Desire 310 is quite an attraction, thanks to the HTC’s design thinktank.