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HTC Desire C tested with first benchmarks

The HTC Desire C has been benchmarked -- can an affordable phone cope with the demands of Ice Cream Sandwich?

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Richard Trenholm Former Movie and TV Senior Editor
Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.
Expertise Films, TV, Movies, Television, Technology
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Richard Trenholm
2 min read
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More details have emerged on the HTC Desire C, the forthcoming budget Ice Cream Sandwich phone. It's been tested and benchmarked to see if a low-specced affordable phone can cope with the demands of up-to-date Android.

Inside the Desire C is a 600MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Adreno 200 graphics chip. It's possibly the lowest-specced phone to run Ice Cream Sandwich, even leading us to wonder whether it could properly handle ICS at all.

One reason we're interested in the new Desire's performance is its similarity, on paper, to last year's HTC Wildfire S. They both pack a 600MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, so it's an opportunity to see whether newer really is better, all else being roughly equal.

GSM Dome evaluated the Desire C using the AnTuTu and Quadrant benchmark apps, which test graphics performance, processor speeds and more. The phone managed a Quadrant score of 1,452 and an AnTuTu total of 1,929 -- beating the Wildfire S' score of 1,522. The Wildfire S performs better at graphics, but overall it seems the Desire C has a lot going for it, especially if it's as cheap as we hope.

Some previous lower-specced HTC phones, including the HTC Explorer, featured specially adapted cut-down versions of the HTC Sense interface. To take the strain off a less powerful processor, the adapted version of Sense dispensed with the flashy animations and other non-essential, power-hungry features.

Of course, processor strain won't be a problem for HTC's current superstars, the quad-core HTC One X, dual-core HTC One S and HTC One V.

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