Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

According to HTC, the HTC 10 Evo—known as the HTC Bolt and sold exclusively by Sprint in the US—is the ideal phone for the lucrative £450-£500 smartphone market (its exact price is TBC). It’s a market dominated by companies that sell last-generation flagships which once sold for upwards of £600 at cut-down prices, it says, and phones from the likes of Huawei and ZTE that contain own-brand chipsets rather than full-blown Qualcomm Snapdragons. The HTC 10 Evo, with its full-metal body, large 1440p display, and Snapdragon SoC should, on paper at least, cover that segment nicely.

Except I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would buy one.

The HTC 10 Evo is powered by a Snapdragon 810, an octa-core SoC that first made an appearance in 2014, and was used in HTC’s M9 during 2015. Which is not to say that the 810 makes the Evo slow. Indeed, performance under Android 7.0 Nougat was fine during a brief hands-on. But a brand new, unlocked 32GB HTC 10—which Ars named one of the best Android smartphones released this year—costs less than £500 from numerous online stores. This is a phone that packs the latest (or near-enough latest) Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, and a 3,000mAh battery inside a slick metal chassis.