HTC Desire C Becomes Official - Bringing Android 4.0 on a Budget

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After making an unplanned appearance earlier in the week, HTC has now officially revealed a new smartphone in the form of the Desire C.

Unlike the likes of the One X and One S, this phone isn’t like to get a big fancy unveiling and media event. Instead, HTC launched a ‘first look’ video this morning along with a slew of information.

The company has been focusing hard on its new One series of smartphones, but now it has strangely returned to last year’s family of phones, the Desire range. The Desire C mixes the new software and looks of the One phones with a low price, and looks to be a good package for those on a budget.

It features the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system along with HTC’s Sense 4.0 user interface, so the Desire C will look and feel the same on screen as the One X and One S. Beats Audio is also on the Desire C, claiming to give you music “as the artist intended”.

Size-wise the Desire C is in the same league as the Wildfire series, with a small and rounded shape and a 3.5-inch touchscreen with a HVGA resolution of 320 x 480 pixels.

On the back the phone has a 5-megapixel autofocus camera but without an LED flash, which means low-light pictures won’t come out so well. We do like the attention to detail here though, where HTC has brought across the red and silver metallic ring that goes around the camera lens.

HTC hasn’t revealed the amount of storage on board with the Desire C, although we don’t have high hopes for it being much higher than 4GB. However, as with the One series phones, every customer will get 25GB of cloud storage space courtesy of Dropbox, which should make up for it. Update: Internal storage has been confirmed to be 4GB, with 512MB of RAM to back it up.

HTC says there will be a black and a silver version available, although in the video we also see a red model joining them. In the press release HTC says a version of the Desire C will become available with NFC wireless connectivity, so perhaps the red model is it.

T-Mobile UK has already confirmed it will be stocking the Desire C as of early next month, with the handset coming free on 24-month contracts from £15.50 per month. For pay as you go customers the cost will be £169.9, which we think is very reasonable to get a well-made smartphone running the latest version of Android. Update: Orange and Three have also confirmed they will be stocking the Desire C from next month.