HTC was amongst the most popular Android smartphone brands between 2007 and 2013. In recent years, however, they’ve lost their dominance to the likes of Samsung and Huawei. The reasons from a consumer perspective are rather simple: HTC just didn’t make compelling enough phones while their competition did just that.

Since 2013, HTC has focused on one flagship phone per year in the form of the One series. They seen mild success with it. Alongside the One, HTC has been pumping out all sorts of budget Android smartphones under the “Desire” brand. The Desire 628 is one such phone.

The Desire 628 comes in a slim plastic body. It comes with a decent 5” HD display. It’s not as sharp as some other phones available in the same bracket, but really including and after HD, you really can’t feel a significant difference. Android Lollipop v5.1 comes built-in, with HTC’s Sense 7 custom skin added on top. It’s a dual SIM phone, so that’s nice.

The chip inside the Desire 628 is an Octa-core running at 1.3GHz. We were unable to find the exact chip’s model in a preliminary search on Google. However, Android is optimized enough these day and chips have become advanced enough for budget phones to offer decent performance out of the box. HTC included 3GB of RAM which is plenty spacious to run multiple apps. Storage space is excellent, too, with a 32GB ROM.

HTC’s cameras have always been “just decent”, and the Desire 628 is no different. On paper, the 13MP rear camera and the 5MP front camera sound great but budget smartphones use cheaper sensors which have poor image quality. You can capture Full HD 1080p video at 30fps. All in all, it should be alright in the price range. 

We’re slightly miffed at the battery. It’s only a 2200mAh one, and a non-removable at that. Basic users should be able to get a whole day out of it. The rest of us will need to be close to a charger after a heavy day’s usage.