The HTC Desire 10 Pro was one of the two smartphones that were revealed and subsequently released late last year, the other being the HTC Desire 10 Lifestyle. Of the two, the Desire 10 Pro sported the better specs and the more premium price tag but that didn’t necessarily make it a worse phone. So does the Desire in the name actually make one want it?
A Flashy Design
Unlike the HTC 10, the HTC Desire 10 Pro does not come in a metal unibody, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has a terrible design; it’s still quite aesthetically pleasing. A metallic gold contour design does a fantastic job of making the phone pop in people’s eyes, elegantly outlining the smartphone. While I’m currently testing out the “Polar White” colour variant of the phone, I urge people to opt for the “Stone Black” variant, as the gold trimmings stand out more on that version.
When it comes to size, the HTC Desire 10 Pro measures in at 156.5 x 76 x 7.9 mm and weighs 165 grammes. It’s slightly bigger but not as heavy as the HTC 10 Evo and has the nearly same dimensions as that of the Huawei Mate 9. It’s a light product but still has a certain sturdiness to it, even if it feels like a heavy gust of wind will blow it out of your hand. While it can fit comfortably in one hand, certain tasks will require you to use both, which I found comfortable doing so thanks to the width of the smartphone.
The left face of the smartphone is bare except for the recessed Dual SIM compartment. One of those potential SIMs can be swapped for a microSD card. The right face of the smartphone has the volume rocker and the power button, both separated by about a centimetre, with the power button standing out thanks to its textured surface. The top face is also mostly bare, lacking any infrared transmitter and housing just a 3.5 mm headphone port. The micro USB charging port sits on the bottom face, next to a speaker grill. On the back you’ll find the fingerprint reader, sitting below the sizeable camera lens and LED flash. The front is mostly taken up by the sizeable 5.5-inch display, with the space below it hosting the navigational keys and the front-facing camera, earpiece and proximity sensor at the top.
An HD Display
For a medium end phone, HTC has fitted a 1920x1080p 5.5-inch display that takes up just over 70% of the front face. This results in a pixel density of 400 PPI, which while not the best, is still quite good. When it comes to general usage, I found the HTC Desire 10 Pro’s display to be clear but lacking in brightness, with colours being vivid, though nowhere near that of an AMOLED display. A QHD display would have been nice, but that would have pushed the price up out of the mid-tier smartphone range. Viewing angles are great, though there is a colour drop-off when viewed at an extreme gradient. The slight dimness means you may not want to use this smartphone out in the sun.
A 20 MP Camera
The camera on the HTC Desire 10 Pro may look and feel similar to some people and that’s because it’s the exact same one that was on the flagship HTC One M9 that came out a few years ago. The module houses a 20 MP lens with a f/2.2 aperture and comes with HDR and dual-LED flash as well as laser autofocus. It’s not one of the best camera modules out there, especially when compared to recent flagship smartphones such as the iPhone 7, Google Pixel or Huawei Mate 9, but for a mid-tier phone, it does a bang up job.
The HTC Desire 10 Pro comes with a myriad of different camera modes, the most prominent of which is the Pro mode. The pro mode will let you fine tune a myriad of settings including the shutter speed, white balance, exposure value, ISO and focus. Video is shot at 1080p and in 30FPS. Meanwhile, those of us who use Snapchat and Instagram stories will be quite pleased with the 13MP front-facing camera on the HTC Desire 10 Pro. The selfie camera is also capable of shooting 1080p video.
Sensible Software
The HTC Desire 10 Pro runs its own skin of Android called HTC Sense. It’s a lean skin of the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS and my experience using it wasn’t tedious. Swiping through home screens is fast and for the most part, HTC has opted to use default Google apps, keeping bloatware to a minimum which is a refreshing change. The HTC Sense skin comes with an app drawer letting you hide those apps you don’t want on your home screen. The HTC Sense skin comes into its own when you want to customise the appearance of the home screens with various themes and stickers.
Average Performance
The HTC Desire 10 Pro is powered by a Mediatek MT6755 Helio P10 chipset that houses an Octa-core CPU (4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.0 GHz Cortex-A53) as well as a Mali-T860MP2 GPU. This chipset is backed up by up to 4GB of RAM (there is a 3GB variant). The combination of all these bits and bobs is…rather flat. Day-to-day menial tasks such as messaging, emailing and watching videos can be done without too much hassle. However, when 3D effects are called into questions or when more heavily intensive apps are running such as games, performance takes a steep decline.
Dropped frames are visible as is stuttering and a slight amount of freezing when the smartphone has a couple of apps open simultaneously. It’s not the end of the world, but it certainly isn’t a top-notch seamless experience.
In the benchmark I ran using Geekbench, it scored 739 as the Single-Core score and 2770 as the Multi-Core score. While there is no exact price yet for the Middle-East version of the phone, it’s currently being retailed in India for about AED 1,476. In comparison, the One Plus 3 which is being retailed for a slightly lower price has a Single-Core score of 1698 and a Multi-Core score of 4015. Unfortunately, when it comes to raw numbers the MediaTek chipset does not live up to its competitors in the same price range.
The HTC Desire 10 Pro comes in two variants, a 32GB version with 3GB of RAM and a 64 GB version with 4GB of RAM. Audio quality, while not as great as the HTC Desire 10 Lifestyle, is still quite good as is listening with headphones thanks to HTC’s BoomSound tech. Meanwhile, the battery packs 3,000 mAh and supports fast charging, albeit through a USB 2.0 port. As a result, you will still have to wait for around an hour to get it to charge to 90%. Battery life is again adequate, with medium to heavy usage still leaving me with at the least 15% of battery at the end of a day.
Absolute Verdict
The HTC Desire 10 Pro is an aesthetically pleasing smartphone, with a beautiful gold contour framing the smartphone. An HD display does a great job of reproducing colours but lacks in brightness and, while I would like to have had a QHD display, for a mid-tier smartphone it’s more than apt for the job. The camera on the Pro does a bang up job of taking pictures, even in low light and is more than adequate for a mid-tier smartphone. However, the place the HTC Desire 10 Pro falls short is in the performance department. Compared to other industry leading mid-tier smartphones, the HTC 10 Desire Pro falls quite short.
