HTC Desire 510 review: Inbetweener

HTC Zoe

HTC Zoe is a mini social network centered on sharing photos and videos. A landmark feature is the cool Highlights videos, which are created automatically for each album.

HTC Sense 6 features Zoe as a standalone multimedia app, which requires you to sign in with your HTC account the first time you open it. Captured photos and videos are automatically compiled into a Zoe video highlight reel.

HTC Zoe

Creating a Zoe is easy. You simply choose from the available images and rearrange them in order you like. Themes and soundtracks are available in case you want to be extra creative. Once finished editing, you can easily share Zoes.

Zoe also allows you to collaborate with friends on the same project. You can send requests and combine your media content into the same Zoe. Keep in mind that the app doesn't work in all regions.

Beautiful Gallery

The regular image gallery stacks photos together in albums, which can be organized by the date they were captured or the source they come from. Location-based sorting is also available.

Gallery

As usual, there is an array of available options at your disposal. You can edit, share, highlight, and delete images. You can also set them as backgrounds, assign them to contacts, add them to a specific album, or print them.

Once you open an album, the first and biggest thumbnail is reserved for slideshows. Once you tap it you can customize if you want an effect added over the photos and what sort of music you would like to play.

Slideshows edit mode

The gallery also comes with integrated capable image editor.

Image editing

Video player is part of the Gallery

The video player on the HTC Desire 510 has a rather simple interface. There isn't a dedicated app - you just pick a video from the gallery.

You get a Play/Pause button and a slider to scrub through the video, a button to capture images from the video, volume slider, and sharing options. All of these hide automatically after a few seconds.

Video player

The HTC Desire 510 managed to play most of the files we threw at it and had issues only with FLV, MOV, XVID and DIVX, plus MKV files. The AC-3 audio codec is a no-go though and some older XVID files turned out incompatible as well.

Subtitles were also not supported, with no options to enable them nor did they automatically playback if in the same folder as the video file.

You can always go to the Google Play store and download a more capable video app for free.

Great music player

The HTC Sense 6 music player features a similar layout as the one in the previous version. The flattened interface design however makes the setup look fresh.

Your music library is organized by Artist, Album, Songs, Playlists, Genres, Podcasts or Folders (we don't see this last option very often). The phone will also easily stream songs over DLNA.

The music player can automatically look for and download Album art and artist photos (you can limit it to Wi-Fi connections only), and search for lyrics.

Music player

There are no equalizers on board.

Now playing

The FM Radio is aboard with RDS support. It automatically saves available stations and has one of the simplest interfaces we've seen. There are play controls - play, stop, skip and a loudspeaker option.

FM Radio

Class-leading audio output

The HTC Desire 510 is easily the best performing audio device in its price range. And that fact that this isn't even much news speaks volumes about its manufacturer.

The smartphone had excellent readings top to bottom when used with an active external amplifier. Add the very high volume levels and you get an output even a flagship would be proud of.

Plugging in a pair of headphones causes a very modest increase in stereo crosstalk, meaning the output is still miles ahead of the competition and better than quite a few flagships. Good job HTC!

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

HTC Desire 510 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.