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The HTC Desire 650 is definitely the grooviest phone we’ve seen in a while

Andy Boxall
Williams Pelegrin
By and

HTC’s getting its groove on with the Desire 650. Oddly the smartphone company decided not to launch and show off its latest Android device at the CES 2017 technology trade show last week, waiting instead until the week after. Sadly, this means we only get to see some renders of the phone, rather than getting it in our hands.

This is definitely a shame, because the Desire 650 is likely to be all about how it feels to hold, due to the unusual grooved and smoothed out back cover. The smooth top half of the phone looks like most other Desire models, but the lower half has a funky grooved texture, designed to improve grip and keep it from slipping out your hands. Plus, it looks pretty cool too.

More: HTC’s holding an event on January 12, new smartphones expected

There are two color schemes, the cool lime light edition and a moody dark blue version, with the former really accentuating the grooved look. The Desire 650’s technical specifications mark it as a mid-range phone, but we’re surprised at the use of a 1.6GHz Snapdragon 400 processor, a chip that has been around for several years. It’s a staple of HTC’s Desire and other mid-range devices though, so it should be perfectly adequate.

A 5-inch, 1280 x 720 pixel LCD screen shows Android 6.0 Marshmallow with the HTC Sense user interface over the top, and there’s 16GB of internal storage for all your photos and apps, plus a MicroSD card slot to give this figure a boost. The main camera has 13 megapixels, while the front has 5 megapixels, plus there’s HTC’s BoomSound audio software for hi-res file playback. Finally, a 2,200mAh battery, 4G LTE, and a 3.5mm headphone socket complete the specification list.

If you think the Desire 650 looks familiar, that’s because it was initially announced for release in Taiwan in November 2016. Now, HTC says the Desire 650 will be sold in the U.K., but hasn’t mentioned any other regions, or confirmed how much the phone will cost.

Article originally published 11/23/2016 by Williams Pelegrin. Updated on 01/10/2017 by Andy Boxall: Rewritten, adding in UK Desire 650 launch news

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