HTC unveils new cut-price Desire 816 phablet
Taiwanese giant also introduces the classy Desire 610 mid-range smartphone
Can’t wait any longer for the HTC One Plus (or whatever it’s called this week)?
Well you’re going to have to; it won’t be announced until a special event on 25 March.
But in the meantime, HTC has announced two new Desire smartphones at MWC, and they both look rather lovely.
HTC Desire 816
The Desire 816 is the big news – both literally and figuratively.
It’s HTC’s second largest phone ever, with a 5.5in screen that’s beaten by only the humongous 5.9in HTC One Max in the size stakes.
It shares the HTC One‘s design flair, while adding a microSD slot that the One could really have done with. There’s no place for the One’s opinion-splitting Ultrapixel camera, though, with the Desire 816 instead getting an impressive-sounding 13MP, f2.2-lensed effort. Happy face.
That’s the good news – the slightly ‘meh’ news is that its display is only 720p, and it also has to make do with a quad-core 1.6GHz Snapdragon 400 processor rather than the Snapdragon 800 you’d find in the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. A 2600mAh battery, 1.5GB of RAM and 4G round out a decent sounding package, and it will also of course rock HTC’s wonderful Sense skin, complete with the so-good-we’d-be-lost-without-it BlinkFeed.
HTC Desire 610
Think of the Desire 610 as the HTC One Lite and you won’t be far wrong.
Like its more premium cousin, it has a 4.7in screen and a stylish form complete with twin speakers on the front. It also gets microSD-upgradable storage, 1GB of RAM and an 8MP camera. Its screen is only 960×540, though, which feels a bit 2011, while the 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor isn’t likely to win any speed contests.
Would we buy one? Depends how much it costs. And in any case, it’s still the HTC One Plus we’re holding out for.
READ MORE: Keep up to date with all the MWC 2014 stories on stuff.tv
Marc McLaren
Contributor 
