Amidst all the flagship smartphones that are being unveiled officially at MWC, HTC decided that it would rather announce a bunch of affordable handsets this Sunday. While its upcoming One M10 flagship is expected to come later in the year, the Taiwanese tech company had earlier unveiled the upper mid-range One X9 smartphone and also announced that its Vive virtual reality headset will be priced at $799. Now, the company has officially taken the wraps off of three brand new entry-level and mid-ranged smartphones as part of the company’s ever-expanding ‘Desire’ portfolio. The Desire 530, Desire 630 and Desire 825 are standard fare at the entry and lower mid-range in hardware terms, but HTC has managed to bring in a splash of color to the entire lineup that the company claims is inspired by “streetwear fashion”.
According to the company, the splatter effect on the polycarbonate rear covers of the handsets are completely unique to each device and are created by a “micro splash” process. HTC is also putting emphasis on the sound and according to the company, all three handsets come with HTC’s proprietary BoomSound profile for their headsets, while both the Desire 630 and the Desire 825 feature Dolby Audio. As for the phones themselves, all three seem destined for the prepaid market for the most part, going by the hardware specs released by the company officially. On the software front, they all come with Android Marshmallow pre-installed and the two more premium handsets apparently also come with the ‘Live Make-Up’ feature as part of their camera software, which allows users to touch-up their images on the go.
Coming to the hardware specs of the just-announced devices, the Desire 825 seems to be the most ‘premium’ of the lot, with a 5.5-inch 720p screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of expandable storage. The cameras come with 5-megapixel and 13-megapixel sensors on the front and the back respectively, while the battery capacity is 2,700 mAh. The Desire 630 comes with a smaller 5-inch, 720p screen, and is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC, whist packing 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of expandable storage. The device rocks a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera, and carries a 2,200 mAh battery.
As for the Desire 530, it’s likely to be the most affordable of the lot, seeing as the device comes with a Qualcomm MSM8909 Snapdragon 210 processor under the hood. The handset still features 5-inch 720p display alright, but has only 1.5 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, 8 and 5-megapixel primary and secondary cameras respectively and a removable 2,200 mAh Li-Ion battery. While the spec-sheet of the device looks suspiciously like the so-called HTC A16 that was leaked over the last few days, there’s no confirmation from HTC regarding the matter. Either way, there’s still no word regarding the pricing or the ETA, but we’ll keep you in touch as and when we come across any such info.
