HTC Desire 616 spotted with octa-core MediaTek processor

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, HTCannounced two new midrange smartphones, the Desire 816 and 610, followed by the budget oriented Desire 310 shortly afterwards. Now another mid-range HTChandset has been spotted over in China, the Desire 616, which has just passed through the Chinese equivalent of the FCC.

Oh just another mid-range smartphone I hear you say? Well not quite, the Desire 616 is HTC’s first octa-core powered handset.

The Desire 616 appears to be packing a MediaTek MT6592 chip, which is clocked at 1.7GHz across each of its eight Cortex-A7 CPU cores. Whilst these aren’t as powerful as the heavy duty CPU cores found in the likes of Samsung’s octa-core big.LITTLE SoC, they should still pack enough punch for the vast majority of smartphone processing tasks, whilst helping to keep energy consumption to a minimum.

Other hardware specs include 1 GB of RAM, a 5 inch display with an HD resolution of 720×1280, an 8 MP main camera with LED flash, and Android 4.2.2 complete with HTC’s Sense 5. Although this could be bumped up to KitKat and Sense 6 by the time of the official launch. According to the source, the handset will also be made available in black, white, red, blue and yellow colors.

Not only have that, but images of the smartphone have already appeared too. It seems that HTCcan’t keep anything under wraps lately.

I can’t fault HTCfor sticking to its familiar aesthetic design, and an eight core setup certainly makes for an interesting mid-range product. The octa-core handset is expected to be officially unveiled sometime in Q2 2014, but we’re not sure on the exact release date or launch regions at this point.

What do you make of HTC’s Desire 616, would you be interesting in a smartphone powered by an eight core MediaTek processor?