Today, HTC announced several new smartphones for the Indian market: the ARMv8-based Desire 820, the Desire 820Q which uses a lower-end processor also based on the ARMv8 architecture and the Desire 816G, which is a 3G version of the older Desire 816 released this spring.
The Desire 820 and Desire 820Q are almost identical in terms of specifications except for their respective processors. The Desire 820 uses the mid-range Snapdragon 615, which is a chip that has a similar setup to big.Little, considering that it's using four 1.0 GHz Cortex A53 cores for lower-end tasks and four 1.5 GHz Cortex A53 cores for higher-end tasks.
It's doubtful there are major power consumption improvements from this setup considering that it's using the same cores for both simple and complex tasks, and Cortex A53 should already scale with the required performance, making a separate cluster of lower-clocked Cortex A53 unnecessary.
The Snapdragon 615 comes with an Adreno 405 GPU, which offers some improved performance and support for OpenGL ES 3.1 compared to its Adreno 305 predecessor, and it also supports 1080p at 60 fps decoding in the AVC and HEVC formats.
The Desire 820Q comes with a lower-end Snapdragon 410, which is the successor to the popular Snapdragon 400 SoC. Snapdragon 410 includes four 1.2 GHz Cortex A53 cores and an Adreno 306 GPU. It supports decoding from the HEVC format, but only for up to 720p resolution.
The Desire 820 and Desire 820 Q also feature 5.5" screens with 720p resolution, 13 MP rear cameras, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and microSD support.
The Desire 816G is quite similar to the original Desire 816, although it seems HTC has swapped its 1.5 GB of RAM and Snapdragon 400 processor for 1 GB of RAM and a Mediatek quad-core 1.3 GHz processor. As mentioned above, HTC has also removed its 4G connectivity, so the Desire 816G is only a 3G phone now. Presumably, HTC did this to reduce costs and sell the phone for a lower price in India, where 4G connectivity is either not very widespread or expensive.
The Desire 816G will be priced at INR 18,990 ($311 USD) and will arrive on the Indian market in early October. The Desire 820 and Desire 820Q haven't been priced yet, but they should be available in early November.
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