HTC has never really been good at gaining a lot of market share and mindshare as a result of market share, by making a ton of lower end phones, like everyone else. It might even be one of the reasons they are failing right now – not enough customers know about HTC, and not enough of them “upgrade” from a lower end HTC device to a higher-end one, like it happens say for Samsung, where some may be a Galaxy Ace as their first smartphone, and move on to a Galaxy S4 or a Note 3.
So this new HTC Desire 300 device might be a move in the right direction, if and only if HTC decides to sell it for a good price, because in the past they’ve tended to price their mid-range phones significantly higher than the competitors. If their low-end phones aren’t price competitive, they might not stand a chance against the competition, which would make the whole exercise pointless.
Here’s what the Desire 300 specs look like:
- Size: 131.78 x 66.23 x 10.12 mm
- Weight: 120g
- 4.3-inch WVGA display (800 x 480 resolution)
- 1GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor
- 512MB of RAM
- 4GB of storage (1.4GB available to the user)
- microSD support up to 64GB of memory
- 5-megapixel camera with f2.8 aperture, 34mm lens and WVGA recording
- VGA front facing camera
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- GPS, AGPS
- 1650mAh removable battery
- Android with HTC Sense on top (with BlinkFeed)
As you can see there’s nothing too groundbreaking here, although it does come with a dual core chip, and a 800×480 resolution display, which makes me think it will be priced at least $200. The RAM is pretty low, and it might be a problem especially until Android 5.0 arrives with all of its under the hood improvements. The fact that it will be running Sense on top of stock Android won’t do this phone any favors in terms of performance or memory, though.
The storage is on par with what you see in the usual low-end phones these days. It has 4 GB of internal storage, of which about half is probably occupied by Android+Sense. It does have microSD support up to 64GB, so that should help at least with storage for personal media.
The phone will be launched in October this year, and the price is not yet know, but it’s probably not going to be sub-$100, but more on the higher range of low-end phones.