HTC announces ‘budget’ Android called Explorer

Ok, so we have good news and bad news. The good news is that HTC has just announced their new ‘budget-friendly’ droid called the Explorer that will hit retail shelves in India sometime next month. The bad news is that, it’s going to be priced at Rs.12,650, which is too high given the specifications. Other than the standard black and navy trims, we’ll also be able to change the back cover for more colours like metallic orange, blue, purple and white.

Bad pricing from HTC

The explorer is very similar to the Micromax A70 we just reviewed with slight differences for the better. For instance, it has Wi-Fi ‘n’, supports HSUPA and Gingerbread v2.3 with Sense. However, it’s also lacking in many areas such as the omission of a front-facing camera and a smaller battery of just 1230mAh, which means a weaker battery life. The rest of the features are very similar right from the screen size and resolution to the 600Mhz Qualcomm processor onboard. This is the same story as the HTC Wildfire all over again. It was very decent phone, but the high price made everyone ignore it. If HTC had only priced the Explorer around 8K-9K, then we could have recommended it over the A70, due to Gingerbread and Sense, but not at this price. Some of the highlights of the phone include:

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• 3.2-inch touchscreen with 320 x 480 pixel resolution

• 3G, EDGE/GPRS, Wi-Fi

• GPS with A-GPS support

• Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0

• 3.1 megapixel camera

• Memory expandable up to 32GB via microSD card

• 3.5 mm handsfree socket