HTC has announced a new mid-range smartphone this morning, the Desire 830. While Desire announcements are typically met with minimal fanfare here in the United States, these are volume sellers for HTC in many markets including its home country, Taiwan, where the phone will initially be available for sale starting this Friday. The price is NT$9,990, which is roughly $310 US.
While the phone does lack a fingerprint scanner, it's interesting to see HTC sticking to functional design choices of older One-series devices on the 830, particularly software navigation keys and dual front-facing BoomSound speakers. The HTC 10 has capacitive navigation keys and one front-facing speaker, along with a second, bottom-firing speaker, which are arranged in a stereo configuration.
As for the real meat of the specifications, here's what we've seen from secondary sources this morning (HTC's press release does not elaborate).
- 5.5" 1080p LCD display
- Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Sense UI
- 32GB storage (plus microSD)
- 3GB RAM
- Octacore MediaTek Helio X10 processor @ 1.5GHz
- 13MP rear camera with OIS, f/2.0 aperture
- 4MP front-facing Ultrapixel camera
- 2800mAh battery
HTC's Desire line is arguably looking pretty good these days - the clean back, in particular, appeals to me. The specifications seem fairly standard fare for a mid-range phone, but HTC's pricing arguably seems a bit high here with all of the competition occurring in the $300-400 smartphone market. Granted, that price is based on the Taiwan MSRP, so we'll have to see what the money factor looks like when and if this phone arrives in other markets.
The previously-announced Desire 825 was also included in the press release, as it apparently had not yet received a release date in Taiwan.