While everyone has been busy clamoring over the recently announced HTC One M9 flagship phone, HTC has been quietly preparing their latest mid-ranger for release outside of China. HTC announced the Desire 826 back at CES in January of this year, and subsequently launched it in China later that month. This marks the beginning of a change in HTC’s product lines which have focused on one or two devices in each market for the past few years. We’re now going to be seeing more devices come from HTC than have been produced recently, starting with mid-range and high-end solutions.
The HTC Desire 826 is a phone that we were able to get our hands on back at CSE 2015 in January where it was announced, and was a pretty stellar feeling phone. The body is a solid polycarbonate build with a really nice feeling soft-touch back that’s reminisce of a more rubber type material. It definitely feels less expensive than the HTC One series of all aluminum phones but that doesn’t mean it feels cheap. The launch of the Desire 826 in China marked it as HTC’s first 64-bit device, sporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core chipset inside. 2GB of RAM helps runs the experience without hiccups or waiting for apps to reload constantly, and while 16GB of internal storage isn’t a lot the phone has support for up to a 128GB microSD card for easily removable and expandable storage.
HTC will be launching the Desire 826 in three colors for India: White Birch, Blue Lagoon and Purple Fire. The phone will make its debut on Mahesh Telecom early next week for Rs. 26200, which translates to somewhere around $420 USD for reference. What’s great to see here is that HTC is launching the device with Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the gate, so no waiting for an update to get the Lollipop goodness. Sense UI is of course in tow but isn’t exactly the same version we’ve seen on the HTC One M9, although it’s very similar. What will be really interesting to see is what HTC has up its sleeve with the next upcoming mid-range phone that it’s going to announce next week as well.