Coming to MWC 2014, HTC has brought along two new members of its mid-range Desire family. While the larger HTC Desire 816 leans towards looking good, this Desire 610 is all about sounding good.
At least that’s how HTC wants the masses to perceive this new mid-range smartphone. With a slight nudge towards multimedia, HTC advertises the Desire 610 as a small but powerful entertainment hub. After all, you have features like BlinkFeed to gather your latest news, Video Highlights to shine a spotlight on your photos and videos, and, in light of its falling out with Beats, HTC’s own BoomSound audio technology for music.
But beneath the marketing speak, the Desire 610’s hardware could keep it from achieving entertainment fame. It’s 4.7-inch screen only has a qHD resolution, not quite there for great video watching experience. The 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 might give a bit of juice, but for an entertainment device, it only has 1 GB of RAM and only 8 GB of internal storage. Luckily, one can expand it with a microSD card. The 8 megapixel rear camera can only record 720p videos while the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera might be just enough for very basic video calls. Fortunately, the device supports 4G LTE networks, so at least your streaming media cravings will be satiated.
Of course, it would not be fair to look for high-end multimedia hardware in a device that’s targeted for a budget market, but it should be good to know what you will be getting for your cash. HTC has not yet revealed any pricing scheme for the HTC Desire 610, but expected it to hit stores in Europe in May.
