HTC A55, the first quad HD or 2K phone from the Taiwanese brand, will have a price tag of around 36,000-39,000 when it launches in India in March, a source in the know said.
The HTC A55, according to a leak by Upleaks earlier this month, have a 5.5-inch quad-HD display and be the first phone in India to come with a 64-bit MediaTek chip.
It will be 50% more powerful than Google Nexus 6, priced at Rs 43,999 in India. The underlying MT6795 chip was tested today at Geekbench and scored 4,536 points, which makes even more powerful than the Snapdragon 810 series.
The Snapdragon 810 scored 3,576 on Geekbench.
As mentioned earlier, MediaTek has fallen behind Qualcomm in bringing both LTE and 64-bit chips to India, but will do so in March, and the HTC A55 seems to the first candidate to help the fellow Taiwanese company do that.
It must be noted that the A55 will not be HTC’s top phone. That distinction will belong to the M9, the successor to the current flagship M8.
However, in terms of specifications, the HTC A55 will have nearly everything offered by current flagships such as Google’s Nexus 6 and LG’s G3.
The phone will come with the MT6795 chip from MediaTek. The MT6795 is the 64-bit chip aimed at high-end phones, while MT6752 is for mid-range and MT6732 for the entry level.
According to the leaker, the A55 will have 3GB of RAM, 32GB of built-in storage, a 20-megapixel back camera and a 13-megapixel front camera and HTC Sense 7.0 on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
In other words, it will more or less be equal to the best phone out there in India right now.
The indicated price of 40,000 or less would easily make it the cheapest 2K phone in India other than the Lenovo Vibe Z2 pro (priced at Rs 33,000).
According to our source, price could even be closer to 35,000.
The reason the price would be lower than others is the use of the MT6795 chip, which will be cheaper than the Snapdragon 810 series, its closest competitor.
The MT6795 will also support DDR3 at 933MHz, 120Hz display, and even 480 frames per second when playing 1080p Full HD slowmotion video.
It will also have built-in hardware support for the next video decoding standard, H.265 Ultra HD, and support UHD videos in VP9 format as well.
LTE speeds supported will be 150Mbps down and 50Mbps up and will also support wireless charging.
With this announcement, it is now left for Samsung to announce a flagship phone with quad-HD display.
HTC will also launch the Desire 826 by the end of this month at a price less than Rs 30,000. The phone will come with a full HD display.
The HTC A55’s biggest competitor will be the Google Nexus 6, priced at Rs 43,999 in India. However, the Nexus 6 comes with