Arjun pulled out the dark grey HTC Desire 828. The screen had a scratch, the bezels were thick, and the 13MP camera was modest. But the volume keys were still clicky, the battery held a charge (after a replacement he did himself), and the dark grey finish showed no fingerprints or scratches.

He never upgraded. And in his next photo book, the first image was the HTC Desire 828 sitting on a rock under a starry sky, captioned: “The grey one got me home.”

The HTC Desire 828 runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box, with HTC's Sense UI skin on top. The interface is clean and intuitive, with features such as BlinkFeed, which aggregates news and social media updates in a single feed.

The Dark Grey model features a distinctive matte finish on the rear casing.