Earlier this year, we learned that HTC was looking to bring back their Desire brand with two new handsets. The HTC Desire 200 was first spotted in May, being certified by the Taiwan National Communications Commission(NCC), and it’s resurfaced again, this time with video footage.
HTCs plans for the resurrection of the Desire brand seems to indicate they will be using it as their ‘budget’ line; with the recently announced Desire 600 showing specs that are nothing spectacular and the HTC Desire 200 appears to be set to continue this trend offering some very low end specifications.
Specs for the Desire 200 show it comes with a 3.5″ 320 x 480 resolution LCD display, 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB storage space with microSD card slot and a 1,400mAh battery. The actual phone itself looks like a typical HTC phone, with a similar earpiece to the HTC One. Alarmingly, the device in the video is shown to be running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.3), although this could well change before launch.
HTC seems to have abandoned their single phone strategy with the HTC One and returned to the strategy of pushing as many devices as possible into the market. Given that the company has been suffering from poor sales recently, hopefully this will work out for them. There is currently no information on pricing or release date for the Desire 200.
HTC and Samsung are now on WAR. Who releases more phones 🙂
Well this is just a super cheap prepaid phone.
The 4.0 is a sign of just how little effort they put into it. Some old ROM cleaned up a bit to work in a very cheap low spec phone.
It’s really no big deal.
It’ll be under the glass at the smokes counter in Woolworths. Perfectly fine for someone who really doesn’t care about firmware versions.
Pretty much this. The only thing that makes them bad is that they’re usually horribly optimized and it gives Android a bad name.
Why is it ‘alarming’ that its running ICS…?? (genuine question)
ICS is over 1.5 years old.
The source for even Android 4.1 has been available for nearly a full year, if companies are going to insist on releasing lower end devices running software this old then they obviously have no intentions of updating it to current generation software and that should get anyone who intends on looking at it alarmed.
I found it alarming because ICS is over 18 months old now, and Android has had a number of updates since, which have improved both its functionality and stability. It just seems like a weird choice, given that budget handsets running Jelly Bean are already available. Hopefully they find a market, though.
It’s a cute little thing.