If you thought that HTC would be ditching previous brands and focussing on its new ‘One’ name, you’d be wrong. The company is continuing with the Desire range which made it famous in the Android phone market by launching the new HTC Desire 600, which is in fact based on the HTC One.
The new model shares some of HTC’s new features with the flagship One model, namely the BlinkFeed homescreen and BoomSound speakers. As you might expect, other areas have been scaled down to make the Desire 600 a more affordable mobile, including the display and the processor.
Inside the Desire 600 is a quad-core 1.2Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor and 1GB of RAM to provide the power, with Android Jelly Bean and HTC’s latest Sense user interface running the show on the software side of things. Beats Audio links up with HTC’s latest buzz-feature ‘BoomSound’ to provide pumping sound both through headphones and the external speakers.
Whilst not the sharp Full HD display of the HTC One, the Desire 600 still has a very good quality 4.5-inch Super LCD2 screen which puts out a crispy resolution of 960 x 540. Beneath the display is the same bezel as on the HTC One, with the central HTC logo flanked by touch buttons for the Back and Home functions. Like the HTC One there are micro-drilled holes either side of the screen that hide dual speakers – this is what makes BoomSound – which should provide immersive sound for gaming and movies.
HTC hasn’t ported the new UltraPixel camera from the One either – instead there’s an 8 megapixel rear camera with a 28mm f/2.0 lens, LED flash and HTC’s new ImageChip for processing images and videos, which still sounds great, except for some reason it will only record video in 720p HD and not 1080p Full HD as we’ve come to expect from most smartphones. On the front there’s a 1.6 megapixel camera to support video calling and those all-important selfies.
The Desire 600 has bags of connectivity types including NFC, Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX, Wi-Fi n, GPS and AGPS and HSPA, but no 4G connectivity unfortunately. There’s also 8GB of internal memory and a micro SD card slot to expand on this, and dual-SIM slots. Finally, the battery is a decent sized 1,860 mAh which HTC says is good for up to 11.1 hours of talktime. Unlike the HTC One, you’ll be able to take the back off and swap out the battery, which is a bonus.
The mobile aficionados out there will have picked up from the fact that this is a dual SIM phone that it probably won’t be coming to Europe. HTC will launch the phone in the Ukraine, Russia and other markets in the Middle East and Asia in June. There’s currently no confirmation on the phone coming to the UK and Europe or the US, unfortunately.