You can definitely tell that this week is IFA, as manufacturers start to announce devices for the fall and get their holiday line-up ready. Over at HTC, things are looking a little different from the rest of the pack. While Sony and Samsung will be announcing their powerhouses this week, HTC is going after the mid-range with a duo of new phones. The HTC Desire 601 and the Desire 300. The Desire 601 is the “better” device out of the two and comes with some better specs and certainly looks more appealing. What HTC is trying to do here, is boil down some of their key features from the One into the mid-range price point.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Desire 601, picture above, looks remarkably like the One X from last year. The similarities are quite striking, the camera lens and positioning of the flash is almost identical to the One X, as the curved back of the device. However, it’s not as large as the One X, coming in at 4.5-inches. Let’s take a look at the specs:
- 4.5-inch qHD Display (960 x 540)
- Dual-Core Snapdragon 400 at 1.4 Ghz
- 1GB of RAM, with 8GB of Storage
- MicroSD Card Slot
- 5MP rear-facing camera
- BoomSound Speakers, BlinkFeed and HTC Zoe Camera reels
- Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi, NFC and LTE Connectivity
Some of the specs are still a little sketchy, like just what version of Android this guy is running but, we’d like to guess at Android 4.2 or, at least we’d hope. From HTC, the device has been given Sense 5 and many of the features that the One has. Overall though, the Desire 601 is very much a mid-range device. That’s pretty much decided by the device’s specs, with a low-resolution display and a mediocre CPU. However, depending on how much HTC put this up for sale for, it might just find itself a niche in the market.
While there’s no word yet on availability for this device, we’d imagine that the device is going to go on sale throughout Europe before the year is out. With the HTC One Mini on shelves too, it seems that there might be less room for this than the Desire 300. What do you think?