At first glance, the HTC Desire 650 doesn't seem to stray too far from the design of your typical smartphone. A 5-inch LCD screen stretches from top to bottom, with no physical or capacitive buttons to reduce the screen's real estate. Instead, the standard Android "back", "menu" and "options" buttons are displayed on the touchscreen itself. Resolution clocks in at 1280 x 720, with a pixel density of 294ppi. In a nice touch, the screen itself is built from Gorilla Glass, which offers resistance against scratches and contact damage.
HTC shakes things up a little around the back of the Desire 650. While the top half of the back cover is smooth, the bottom half is lined with grooves for added grip. This 50/50 design also makes it easy to tell whether your phone is upside-down without looking at it, which is handy.
On the hardware front, the HTC Desire 650 packs all the standard features expected of a recent smartphone. You've got a 3.5mm audio jack for connecting wired headphones, Bluetooth 4.1 support for syncing wireless devices and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n compatibility for connecting to local wireless networks.
If you love listening to music on your phone, you'll be glad to know that the Desire 650 is certified for Hi-Res audio, which allows it to deliver higher-quality sound from HD sound files like FLAC. Just bear in mind that FLAC files are a lot larger than MP3s, and the Desire 650 only comes with 16GB of internal storage, of which just 10.3GB is actually available to use. Fortunately, you can expand this by as much as 2TB thanks to support for microSD cards.
As a phone originally launched at the tail end of 2016 (before hitting Australian shores in April 2017), the HTC Desire 650 comes with Android 6.0 "Marshmallow" pre-installed. This equips the Desire 650 with such useful features as better battery management tools, greater control over app permissions and context-sensitive suggestions for when you can't find the tool or setting you're looking for. Unfortunately, HTC has not released an official update for later Android versions on the Desire 650.
It's also worth mentioning that HTC has tweaked the stock Android 6.0 interface slightly for the Desire 650. Dubbed HTC Sense, this custom version of Android incorporates additional features like built-in themes, a customisable home screen and an optimisation suite called Boost+ that periodically cleans up unnecessary files in an effort to keep the phone running smoothly.