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Mid-range HTC Desire 830 goes official with BoomSound stereo speakers, OIS camera and full HD 5.5-inch screen

htc-desire-830

HTC has seemingly released its latest mid-range Desire series smartphone in Taiwan. Dubbed ‘Desire 830’ it looks to follow on from the Desire 820 in bringing attractive specs and features to the mid-tier market.

Like practically all Desire phones to date, the 830 is built predominantly from plastic. Its body measures in at 157.5 x 78.9 x 7.79 mm, and has slight curves towards the edges on the back panel, so it should feel pretty comfortable in hand, despite being a 5.5-inch screen-equipped phone. Similar to many other Desire phones, it’s also mostly white with a contrasting colorful edge and camera ring.

As specs go, the device seems very appealing. It has a full HD (1080 x 1920) display on the front powered by an internal 1.5GHz octa-core Helio X10 processor from MediaTek. On the memory front there’s 3GB RAM and 32GB of storage which can be expanded up to 128GB via MicroSD card. What’s more, it boasts a feature that HTC’s flagship ’10’ missed out on: stereo front facing speakers, meaning the Dolby-powered audio during movie watching and gaming should be very immersive. It also happens to be Hi-Res quality, which is great news for smartphone buyers looking for great audio at a low (ish) price.

As a bonus for photography fans, the Desire 830 is HTC‘s first mid-range phone to feature optical image stabilization (OIS) built in to the 13MP main camera. With an f/2.0 aperture it should provide decent lowlight shots too, as should the 4MP UltraPixel f/2.0 camera on the front.

Perhaps the only real downside here is the 2,800mAh battery, which seems pretty low-powered compared to other big phones. Then again, with Android 6.0 Marshmallow‘s power efficiency during standby, and the lack of a QHD screen, we’d be surprised if it can’t get you through a full day on a single charge. And given that it’s not powered by a Snapdragon chip, we dread to think how long it would take to charge if it had a much larger capacity battery.

The Desire 830 will go on sale in Taiwan from May 6 and cost NT $9,990 (approximately $310 USD) and will be available with an orange or blue trim from HTC direct and a number of Taiwanese carriers and retailers.

There’s no news on whether the 830 will make it to western markets yet. For now, all we know is that it’s launching in Taiwan this coming Friday.

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