Expanding its portfolio of its mid to high end, dual SIM offerings in India, Taiwanese cellphone major HTC has announced the launch of three new Android powered Dual SIM handsets in India. The three new handsets are the Desire 700, the Desire 601 and the Desire 501. Let’s quickly look at each one of them.
Desire 700
The Desire 700 is the most expensive of the new lot – priced well over the Rs.30k mark at launch. This is one of the few high end Dual SIM handsets currently available in India – that too from a tier one manufacturer. However, going by the specifications of the device, it seems only the price is high end – not the actual spec themselves. Here’s why. HTC advertises the product to be powered by a “1.2 Ghz Dual Core processor” – but hasn’t revealed the actual SoC itself. The company is touting its excellent imaging capabilities as the USP of the Desire 700 – thanks to its 8 MP rear-facing camera and an aperture of F/2.0 that promises above average low light image quality. HTC’s Zoe mode too makes its appearance here. The front camera is a 2.1 megapixel unit.
The phone gets 8 GB of internal memory – expandable using micro SD cards. There is 1 GB of RAM as well. The all-important display measures 5 inches across and boasts only of qHD resolution (540*960 pixels)! The handset has almost all connectivity options you would expect from a handset of this class including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, GLONASS and USB. There is a 2100 mAH battery residing under the hood.
HTC has also conveniently not revealed the Android version that the Desire 700 (and all the other handsets) runs at launch. We assume it to be a version of Android 4.2 hidden beneath HTC’s SENSE UI.
The HTC Desire 700 has an MOP of Rs. 33,050 which frankly sounds weird to me. The actual market price would be much lower.
Desire 601
The Desire 601 is for someone who thinks the 700 is too high end for them. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC, this phone boasts of a quad core, 1.2 Ghz processor doing the number crunching. It is mated to the Adreno 305 GPU and 1 GB of RAM. The Desire 601 gets a 4 inch qHD display which is only slightly smaller than the one on the Desire 700. This phone runs Android 4.2.2 JellyBean and should be ugradeable to KitKat. Internal memory is 8GB – expandable further using micro SD cards.
The Desire 601 gets a 5 megapixel camera at the rear that is also capable of full HD video recording. The handset also gets a secondary VGA camera at the front. The phone also packs in all HTC Sense UI elements including HTC Zoe, BlinkFeed and BoomSound. Like its higher end cousin the 700, this one too packs in a 2100 Mah battery.
The Desire 601 gets an MOP of Rs.24,190.
Desire 501
Lastly, we have the HTC Desire 501 which is the most affordable of the three dual SIM devices that HTC launched today. Like the other two, this one too gets 8GB of expandable internal storage and 1GB of RAM. There is a 1.15 GHz dual-core processor powering the handset.
The main camera on the Desire 501 is an 8MP unit. The front camera can capture images at 2.1MP – again with an ƒ2.0 aperture for excellent low-light shots. The Desire 501 has an MOP of Rs. 16,890/-
