HTC Desire SV Review

The big names in the mobile industry seem to be finally taking dual-SIM phones seriously as we’re starting to see some relatively high-end phones launching with this feature as well. The latest entrant is the Desire SV from HTC that’s currently up for pre-order on some online retail stores in India. The SV is a dual-SIM (GSM + GSM) handset with a very impressive spec list, at least on paper. Let’s have a look how it is in reality. 

Video Review

Video Review of the Desire SV from HTC

A handsome looking phone

The reflective nature of the screen can be an issue under ambient light or even in sunlight. Opening the rear cover, we have the hot-swap microSD card and the two microSIM slots. One advantage the Desire SV has over phones like the Sony Xperia tipo dual is that both the SIMs can be active at the same time. This means you can send or receive calls and messages from both SIMs simultaneously. Overall,
HTC doesn’t disappoint when it comes to the build and finish of the handset.

Features
Interface
The Desire SV runs on Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4 and Sense 4.1. It should be upgradable to Jelly Bean as well once HTC pushes the update. The user interface is not silky smooth as you’d expect, which is strange considering the handset is powered by a Qualcomm S4 MSM8225 SoC that houses a dual-core CPU and Adreno 203 graphics. It’s not like it has less memory, as 768MB should be ample for a phone with a non-HD resolution. After a little more digging, we found that this chipset from Qualcomm has some rather startling limitations, which we’ll uncover through the course of the article.

A familiar interface

The screen sensitivity is good, but the quality of the screen itself is quite poor. Due to the low resolution, the pixel grid is somewhat noticeable on some backgrounds. There’s also considerable amount of screen tearing when you swipe through the apps. Switching to the second screen causes all the icons to jitter and tear badly, something that’s commonly found in entry-level Androids. The colour reproduction is pretty good since this is a Super LCD 2 screen at the end of the day; however; it’s nowhere close to the performance of the higher-end.

Media
For storing media, you get 4GB of internal storage along with the option to expand it to 32GB via a microSD card slot. The music player also integrates SoundHound and TuneIn Radio for more information on your music and online radio. The player doesn’t have much in terms of sound enhancements other than Beats Audio, which is more hype than anything else. Thankfully, there’s no dearth of free music players in the Play Store that do a much better job.

Easy to use music player

Video playback is severely crippled as the stock player only plays MP4 and WMV; it can’t even playback 720p video! This anomaly is due to the chipset more than the fault of HTC, because the MSM8225 apparently can’t handle anything beyond 480p. It’s also restricted to a screen resolution of 800 x 480, which is why HTC couldn’t have used a better screen even if it wanted to. We’re wondering why HTC chose this SoC in the first place when it could have gone with any other SoC with a better feature set. The Desire X is plagued with the same issues, as it also features the same SoC.