HTC have announced via their Facebook page that the HTC Desire 820s is available from tomorrow in India. Previously, the Desire 820s had only been available for sale in China but it appears that HTC are extending the device across the world. It will be available tomorrow, Thursday, for INR 24,490 (a little under $400) as the dual SIM model. However, the 820s not only offers dual SIM cards but has dual 4G LTE technology, a world’s first.
The Desire 820s is a slightly different device to the HTC Desire 820. The only significant difference between the two devices is that the original Desire 820 is based around a 64-bit, Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, which is a big.LITTLE unit combining four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.5 GHz with four lower powered, A53 cores clocked at up to 1.0 GHz. The 820s is based around an eight core MediaTek MT6752, which like the 820’s Snapdragon is a modern, 64-bit processor. However, the MT6752 has a higher clock speed of up to 1.7 GHz and furthermore, each core can run at this high clock speed although this would be the exception rather than the norm. The two Desire 820 models have a different GPU: the Desire 820 uses Qualcomm’s Adreno chipset whereas the MediaTek uses the Mali-T760.
In other respects, the Desire 820s is similar to the original. It has a 5.5-inch, 720p resolution screen, the processor is backed up by 2 GB of RAM and there’s 16 GB of internal storage, which may be boosted by a MicroSD card of up to 32 GB. There’s a 13MP rear camera and a front-facing 8MP unit. The Desire 820s runs HTC Sense 6 over Android 4.4 Kit Kat and benefits from several HTC refinements introduced from the flagship One range, including HTC Blinkfeed and HTC Video Highlights. The battery is 2,600 mAh, which one might think is comparatively small for a large-screened device but in our review LINK of the original Desire 820, the device has solid battery life thanks to HTC’s software optimizations.
What do you think to HTC selling the Desire 820s outside of China and introducing the ‘phone to the Indian market? Are you looking for an upper / mid-range handset and if so, would you consider the Desire 820? Let us know in the comments below.