Impressed by the HTC 10 and plan on buying it when it launches in your country? You might want to double check the specs of the handset before doing so. In India, China and likely some other Asian markets, HTC will be launching a toned down version of the 10, dubbed the HTC 10 Lifestyle.

This version of the HTC 10 will be powered by a octa-core Snapdragon 652 chipset, instead of the beastly quad-core Snapdragon 820 that is found inside the international variant of the handset. The Snapdragon 652 chip houses four ‘LITTLE’ Cortex-A53 cores and four ‘big’ A72 cores, and despite being inferior to the Snapdragon 820, they do offer more than ample performance. However, the Adreno 510 GPU found inside this chipset is insufficient to power the Quad HD display found on the HTC 10.

As if a lower spec’d chipset was not enough, the HTC 10 Lifestyle will also only come with 3GB RAM. While other specs of the two handsets remain the same, the camera performance is definitely going to take a hit due to the slower ISP found on the Snapdragon 652 chipset.

I am not sure why HTC decided to launch an inferior Lifestyle variant of its flagship handset in the Asian market. Sure, the company might be able to price the handset slightly lower in such markets due to the slightly inferior chipset, but an informed buyer is definitely going to be repelled by this move from the Taiwanese market.