The HTC desire 310 was unveiled as a budget smartphone, but barely received any attention compared to its much pricier and premium sibling the HTC One (M8). However, that doesn’t mean it’s got total nonsense underneath, we took an initiative to give our unbiased insight for admirers given it is available even at local stores here in Kenya. The average price of HTC Desire 310 here in Kenya is about Ksh 23,000, it’s not the kind of price tag you’d expect for a budget device given there are several premium phones costing about the same with serious specs underneath. It makes perfect sense to discuss the survival of HTC’s flagship offering, it is a segment we can all agree the company has un-ignorable presence compared to the lower end market. In this respect, companies like Samsung and Nokia have been able to feature in both segments; however we can’t ignore the relentless efforts it has put in so far.
In the current environment which companies are striving to have thinner devices on the market, I’d say the HTC Desire 310 wasn’t considered for this important feature, it looks and feels weighty but contours along its casing brings in that ergonomic feel. It’s a little large in physical appearance but I guess that was meant to cater for a surprisingly big enough 4.5inch display screen. The screen supports 480×854 pixels screen resolution which is somewhat dated for a device in this price range, but still average in display quality with 218 pixels per inch reproduction.
I had the dark blue variant of Desire 310 but it’s also available in white, the color actually looks good and we liked the fact that the battery cover is removable, something you’d hardly expect on premium siblings, that means the battery is removable. The phone comes with a 2000mAh removable battery which has a sim card slot and MicroSD slot beneath it. No single button was placed at its left edge while the right side has the volume and power button that seemed too soft therefore vulnerable to damage if not pressed carefully. The on-screen buttons for navigation seemed right for this device and we loved the front-firing speaker but would have loved an even bigger front facing camera rather than settling on a VGA.
Underneath the HTC Desire 310 is a Quad-core mediatek processor that’s clocked at 1.3GHz, RAM is sluggishly just 512MB so expect some lags while executing apps on this device. Besides the 4GB internal storage, you can expand up to 32GB with a MicroSD card, I’m told the European version has 1GB of RAM. There’s a 5 Megapixels camera at the rear end with no flash or autofocus feature, which is a big disappointment. It runs on Android version 4.2.1 Jelly bean.