HTC yesterday announced two selfie smartphones for the Indian market, namely Desire 828 and One A9. The smartphones will be made available in the country in two weeks when HTC will announce their price.
Both HTC Desire 828 and One A9 come with 13 Megapixel rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, auto focus, BSI sensor, optical image stabilisation and full HD video recording ability. Both of them also offer HTC UltraPixel (4 MP) front camera that comes with f/2.0 aperture, fixed focus and full HD video recording ability.
Both Desire 828 and One A9 also offers Bluetooth 4.1, WiFi (b/g/n/ac), micro USB port, 3.5 mm jack, 4G connectivity and GPS with GLONASS.
Other than that nothing is common between these two. The One A9 has a 5 inch display with full HD Resolution and Gorilla Glass 4 protection. It measures 145.75×70.8×7.26 mm and weighs 143 grams while the HTC Desire 828 is a bigger device measuring 157.7×78.9×7.9 mm and weighs 148 grams as it has a bigger 5.5 inch display. The touchscreen of Desire 828 also offers full HD resolution.
The Desire 828 comes pre-installed with the Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system and has HTC Sense interface. The OS runs on the 1.5 GHz Mediatek MT6753T octa core processor with 2 GB RAM. This smartphone offers 16 GB of Internal Memory and a 2 TB micro SD card slot.
On the other hand, the HTC One A9 comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system with HTC Sense UI on top, the 64 bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 octa core processor and 2 GB RAM. It has 32 GB of inbuilt storage as well as an expandable storage slot that can hold a 2 TB micro SD card.
The HTC One A9 is a single SIM device with a 2150 mAh battery while the dual SIM Desire 828 offers a 2800 mAh battery.
It is important to note that the HTC launched One A9 just a month after its announcement internationally while Desire 828 has made its global debut from the Indian market. This clearly underlines how much importance HTC is now giving to the Indian market but it would be much more important for HTC to price these devices properly. With international brands like Samsung and Asus offering feature rich smartphones in the affordable segment and Chinese and Indian players upping the stakes every passing day, HTC needs to be aggressive on the pricing front to be successful in the Indian market.