Jun 14, 2011 09:48 GMT  ·  By

Although it's been a while since the HTC Desire Z was officially introduced in India, the smartphone's price did not drop significantly until recently.

Customers who are looking to buy themselves an Android smartphone with slide-out QWERTY keyboard can now purchase the HTC Desire Z for only Rs. 17,099 (about $380) from Saholic retailer.

This is one of the first deals for the HTC Desire Z, as the smartphone is usually much more costly than the price offered by Saholic.

Until recently, the Desire Z could be bought for no less than Rs. 23,000 (about $515) without contract.

Launched on the market in Q4 2010, HTC Desire Z was among the first to support all services offered by the HTCSense.com portal, along to the Desire HD.

For those who are not aware, the HTCSense.com works like a cloud-based service and offers users the possibility to access archived mobile content such as contacts, text messages and call history from a PC.

HTC Desire Z comes with a medium size S-LCD capacitive multi-touch screen that supports 16 million colors and 480 x 800 pixels resolution.

The phone is powered by Android 2.2 (Froyo) with HTC Sense UI on top, and features accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, proximity sensor for auto turn-off, as well as optical trackpad.

It packs 1.5 GB of internal memory, 512 MB RAM, as well as microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).

Equipped with an 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM 7230 processor, complemented by an Adreno 205 GPU (graphics processing unit), the Desire Z is on the mid-budget side when it comes to hardware.

The Desire Z sports an average 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash, face detection and video recording capabilities (720p), as well as full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

According to HTC, the phone's 1300mAh Li-Ion battery should provide up to 430 hours of standby time or up to 10 hours of talk time.