HTC Desire 601: Mid-range smartphone sees Zoe, BoomSound and BlinkFeed trickle down from HTC One
If you haven’t got enough readies available to bag the HTC One Mini, but still fancy a taste of the company’s latest Sense UI enhancements, the newly revealed HTC Desire 601 may be just what you’re looking for.
Though its specs place it firmly in the mid-range of the market, it’s still managed to launch with many of the flagship HTC One’s interface features intact. These include the BlinkFeed social and news aggregating homescreen feed and Zoe, merging video and still image highlight reels together. The handset also makes use of HTC’s BoomSound speaker tech, which on the flagship handset proved surprisingly capable of delivering clear and loud audio if your headphones aren’t to hand.
It’s the hardware then that gives the phone its mid-range placement. Though offering the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 1.4GHz dual-core processor as the HTC One Mini, it’s housed in plastic casing (red, black and white shades will be available). And while its screen is slightly larger than the Mini’s at 4.5-inches compared to the Mini’s 4.3-inches, the quality drops down from the Mini’s 1280 x 720 resolution to the Desire 601’s 960 x 540 resolution.
The camera tech is scaled back too, with the Desire 601 offering a 5-megapixel sensor with a f/2.0 aperture and 28mm lens instead of HTC’s UltraPixel camera found across the One range. 4G LTE is supported though, meaning you’ll be able to take advantage of the freshly launched superfast networks in the UK.
Set for release in September, no exact pricing has been revealed yet. Expect to shave a fair few quid off the HTC One Mini’s £380 price tag though.
