14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that there was some excitement over the upcoming release of the HTC Desire 516 in India after news about its arrival emerged earlier this week.
The smartphone was initially spotted at the Indian import tracking website Zauba a few days ago, and went on sale on eBay India one day later for Rs 13,302 ($220 / €160).
We were disappointed at that time, as we initially though that HTC would price the Desire 516 under Rs 10,000 ($165 / €120), but we were expecting the Taiwanese handset maker to announce a totally different price when the smartphone was officially introduced in India.
Well, that’s exactly what happened, but instead of putting a lower price tag on the smartphone, HTC made the phone more expensive than the version sold through eBay.
Customers in India will be able to buy the HTC Desire 516 in either Dark Gray or Pearl White for no less than Rs 14,200 ($235 / €175) outright.
According to HTC India, the smartphone will go on sale at the end of the month through multiple online retailers. No specific release date has been given though.
“Everyone enjoys a large screen, good quality phone and the HTC Desire 516 dual sim is that very phone. The latest addition to our renowned HTC Desire range combines super-fast processing and premium features at a lower price, offering users the best possible experience in this category,” said Faisal Siddiqui, country head, HTC India.
The Desire 516 seems to have been built especially for emerging markets, but HTC did not price it accordingly as well. The smartphone offers dual-SIM capability with dual standby support, as well as microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).
These are among the features that Android enthusiasts in India treasure most besides the price. The phone is equipped with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, an Adreno 302 graphics processing unit and 1GB of RAM.
HTC Desire 516 sports a large 5-inch capacitive touchscreen display that supports qHD (540 x 960 pixels) resolution. Although the phone packs only 4GB of internal memory, Desire 516 features microSD card slot for storage expansion as mentioned earlier.
The smartphone also comes with dual cameras (5-megapixel rear-facing photo snapper and 2-megapixel secondary camera), HSDPA (42Mbps) support, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS with A-GPS.
The Desire 516 will ship with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box, along with HTC Sense 5.1 UI on top. No word on any future OS upgrade yet.