When HTC made the Nexus One for Google, they also made the HTC Desire smartphone in parallel, which was virtually identical to the Nexus One in terms of specs, and even looks, but it was mainly targeted at non-US markets. Since then, HTC has slowly killed the Desire brand name, but now they are looking to reboot it for their low-end offering.
One of the biggest problems for HTC in the past few years has been its poor management of brands. They had a pretty good brand in Desire at the high-end, but they started messing around with it, while never really pushing it to the US markets. In the US markets they kept pushing all sorts of different brand names every quarter, and no one ever remembered those brands either, or at least they never were that strong.
HTC could’ve used the initial parallel launch with the Nexus One, to push the Desire brand everywhere, and continue to release true next-gen successors, instead of meaningless successors such as Desire HD, Desire Z, Desire XE, and so on. Slowly, but surely, the Desire brand became pretty diluted and it didn’t really represent the high-end spectrum anymore. Ultimately this left HTC with no clear flagships to fight off rivals and increasingly more popular handsets, at the time.
Now, HTC has a more clear strategy in the high-end market with the HTC One, and they plan to revive the Desire brand, which is probably still recognized by some as representing “good phones” for the low-end. Taiwan’s NCC certification body recently received a certain “Desire 200” with the model number “102e, which was recently called an entry-level “G2″, and it will have a 3.5” screen with 480×320 resolution, and 512 MB of RAM. There’s also another one called “Desire 600”, with is a dual-SIM phone with 1.2 Ghz Qualcomm processor, qHD display and running Android 4.1.2.
HTC is definitely pushing for the very low-end, and somewhere between low-end and mid-grade with these two devices, but it looks like at least they will run Jelly Bean, so they should work reasonably well – at least for the price you will be paying for them.
Source: GFxBench Via: AndroidCentral