HTC's new affordable Android phones vary in desirability. But they're all called Desire.

The company's Desire line has been around since 2010, but over the past year it's become the affordable brand that sits below HTC's One line. We've reviewed Desire phones on Sprint, Virgin, Boost, AT&T, and Verizon in the past year, and they've really varied in quality; Verizon's Desire 612 was a great value with a lot of personality, while Sprint's Desire 510 disappointed us in almost every way.

This year's Desire lineup brings one phone with a great-looking design and some attitude, and two that I'm struggling to say anything notable about. HTC is banking on its reputation for build quality here, and on its Sense software, with its well-designed themes and easy-to-use camera app.

HTC showed off its Desire phones and told us they were coming to all the major carriers this summer, but didn't give us specific dates or prices. Those announcements will stagger out soon from the carriers, they said.

Touching Desire

The Desires all run Android 5.1 with the latest version of HTC Sense, which HTC wanted to talk up. That includes a bunch of software features introduced with the HTC One (M9), such as the new themes, app suggester, camera and gallery apps, and enhanced Blinkfeed news feed. Of the three phones, the 626/626s is the one that stands out and could attract some attention—if it performs, which the earlier HTC Desire 510 didn't. They all also have 8-megapixel main cameras and 2-megapixel front cameras.

The biggest Desire is the most attractive. The 626 (postpaid)/626S (prepaid) is downright desirable, because its body has personality; it'll come in a range of two-tone designs, depending on carrier, with blue, red, silver, black, and white all playing roles. The plastic has a fun, friendly texture, with the bumper around the edge feeling like the kind you'd get on an attractive protective case. The 626 has a 5-inch, 720p screen, and 16GB of storage in the postpaid version, 8GB in the prepaid version. There's also a MicroSD card slot, and 1GB of RAM.

The Desire 526 is a Verizon exclusive, and it sounded like some of its specs may have been helpful Verizon requests—for instance, giving it 1.5GB of RAM to make Android version upgrades easier. Otherwise, it felt pretty generic; generic enough that I accidentally mixed it up with the 520 at one point. While HTC talks up its material design, both the 526 and 520 are matte black plastic ovals that could have come out of ZTE's lower-end lineup. It has a 4.7-inch, 960-by-540 LCD screen, 8GB of memory with an additional MicroSD card slot, and 1GB of RAM. 

The Desire 520 doesn't stand out at all. Forget the attractive flat front and misleading "speaker" grilles at the top and bottom; it looks generic and feels a bit cheap. The phone has a 4.5-inch, 854-by-480 screen, 8GB of memory with an additional MicroSD card slot, and 1GB of RAM. 

HTC learned a memory lesson from the Desire 510, which had so little free memory it was difficult to load any apps. The 8GB phones have 3.63GB free for apps, which isn't great, but it's manageable.

I'm concerned about performance here. All the new Desire devices use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor running at 1.1 GHz, which we haven't seen before in retail U.S. devices. The devices we checked out weren't running final firmware, and the chipset is rare enough that it's hard to find benchmark results. We reviewed the Alcatel One Touch Pixi 3, which has a Snapdragon 210, at PCMag Australia and it got a 250/451 on Geekbench, which is significantly slower than even the existing, underperforming HTC Desire 510. This is very concerning. We'll have to see when the Desire phones come to market and we're able to test them.