New Delhi, September 24 – It’s not often that things come to India before they are launched abroad, but things are changing as the Indian smartphone market grows. On Tuesday, HTC launched the Desire 820q in India, which means it is the first country to it.
There are a number of firsts with the device and we played around with it for bit. Read on for our first impressions. Design wise the device is a continuation of the design language we have seen in devices like the HTC Desire 816, but now there is an attractive double shot design. It is also thinner which makes the phone comfortable considering it has a large 5.5-inch screen.
While there is a glossy finish on the phone, which we found to be a little ungainly, HTC executives tell us the matte versions of the phone could come to India easily if the market demanded it.
Internally, the phone packs in an octa-core 64-bit chipset. This no ordinary chipset, in fact, it is the first phone to be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC. This firepower is tied up with 2GB of RAM.
In usage, we found the phone to be very smooth bereft of lags. It is understood that we did not properly stress test the device, so a definitive comment on the performance is not feasible as of yet.
There is 16GB of internal memory, which is nice and the phone also has a microSD card slot. Another big thing about the phone is the fact that it is a dual-SIM smartphone with LTE capability on both its SIM slots. This is yet another first for a phone.
On the back, it has a 13-megapixel camera, while the front now houses a 8-megapixel shooter. We did not test the cameras as the lighting at the event was very bad.
The screen appeared to be quite bright but clearly because of the 720P resolution we could notice pixelated icons. Perhaps, HTC could have bumped up the resolution of the screen. The phone also has a 2,600mAh battery.
Overall, the Desire 820 looks like an impressive device on paper, but there are a lot of variables that are not known. For instance, the price is yet to be announced and the phone will only hit the market by early November. By then there could be other devices in the market.
-INDIA TODAY
