HTC is back — Desire 20 series launching next week

We have heard from multiple sources at HTC that they were no longer making smartphones and were instead focusing on other areas of the tech market such as their Vive series and 5G Wi-Fi devices. Every now and again though rumours appeared or executives accidentally forgot the company line and said smartphones were still coming. Now it is official, at least one HTC smartphone is coming.

According to their social media channels HTC will be releasing their new Desire 20 series next week on June 16. The new series in unlikely to be a flagship smartphone and instead something in the mid-range which their Desire series has been for a long time.

With their fortunes taking a turn for the worse in recent years culminating in them selling most of their smartphone division to Google they are obviously hoping to produce something that everyone will want and at an affordable price.

The Desire 20 (at least one version of it) is rumored to be arriving with a Snapdragon 665 on board alongside 6GB of RAM, FHD+ display and the latest Android version, 10. We have seen higher specced Snapdragon chipsets in the mid-range so this one is not expected to sit in the upper levels of it and tend towards the more affordable end of the market segment.

The mid-range market segment is extremely competitive at the moment with OPPO, Vivo, realme, Samsung and more producing multiple devices all fitting within the segment making it very difficult for HTC to have any impact there. It is possible that after not producing a smartphone for a while they think it would be easier for them to manufacture a mid-range device and that is why they are playing in that segment, no matter how crowded it is.

It will be interesting to see how HTC position this new smartphone and to what regions they will sell it. We feel it is extremely unlikely that it will arrive here in Australia but HTC has a decent brand awareness here in Australia so fingers crossed we get to see it.

What do you think about HTC coming back to the smartphone market? Can they turn around their fortunes with a mid-range smartphone?