HTC Ville C tipped as lower-powered, cheaper One S
New details emerge that suggest HTC is readying a cheaper version of its One S. Though it could share most of the One S's features, it will have a slower processor.
Less than one day after HTC announced its Desire C for U.K. consumers, yet another "quietly brilliant" smartphone has landed on our radar.
BriefMobile obtained details of a handset with the code name of Ville C, which appears to be a cheaper, albeit lower-powered HTC One S.
Hardware details are nearly identical to the One S and include a 4.3 qHD AMOLED display, 16GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, and a 8-megapixel camera. The processor, however, is expected to be a Qualcomm MSM8260 Snapdragon S3 instead of the 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 chipset. Though the image suggests a 1.7GHz CPU, the source advises it will be clocked at 1.2GHz.
Another difference with the Ville C is that it will come with Android 4.0 and HTC Sense 4.5 user interface. As you may recall, HTC only introduced the 4.0 version of its user interface back in February when it announced the One series.
Looking at the details, I'm reminded of HTC's decision to release a string of similarly designed handsets in the middle of last year. Yet, I'd like to see more on this smartphone before making up my mind.
Expanding a handset series might work in some instances, but too many Desire, Wildfire, and One phones could get messy. Indeed, tacking an S, C, V, or X suffix onto the end of a model certainly won't do much to clear things up. What's worse, the 4G LTE variants differ from their GSM counterparts, if only on the processor front. For a company who plans to scale back in 2012, the Ville C doesn't appear to help the HTC cause.
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