Budget-friendly HTC 10, Desire 10, on the way

The HTC 10 is as formidable an effort as Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has ever put forth in the high-end market, but it seems as though it won’t do much to move the company’s bottom line this year: it may only sell 1 million units throughout 2016, an abysmal number. Despite that, though, HTC continues to push forward in the face of negative analyst expectations. The HTC 10 is a stellar device (we’ll have our review of the gadget in soon enough), but the device was $699 unlocked at launch — which is steep indeed. Perhaps if the company could make a more budget-friendly HTC 10 called the Desire 10, it could sell more.

This is the thinking of the company, which means that a more inexpensive HTC 10 is on the way. According to renown leakster and VentureBeat journalist Evan Blass (a.k.a. evleaks), HTC will indeed make the Desire 10 for those who like the company’s design language but don’t care for the high-end price tag. “What’s an HTC 10 without a Desire 10?” Blass wrote at Twitter on July 10th, hinting that the device moniker won’t stay just a moniker for long.

All Blass says at this point is that the Desire 10 will launch in Q3, which means that we could be looking at a launch at some point between now and November. The Desire 10 won’t be the only phone that HTC will launch near year’s end, as the company is also set to launch two HTC Nexus phones, the HTC Nexus Marlin that’ll feature a 5.5-inch, AMOLED display with a Quad HD resolution and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, 8MP/12MP camera combo, USB Type-C, and a 3,450mAh battery, as well as an HTC Nexus Sailfish smartphone that’ll have more modest specs, such as a 5.2-inch, 1080p AMOLED display with 4GB of RAM, 32GB storage, and a 2,770mAh battery.

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