Microsoft is hoping its latest attempt to gain market share in the smartphone platform wars will be more successful with Windows Phone 8. At the moment there are only a few handsets available for the platform with the main ones coming from HTC and Nokia, and today we have news of the HTC 8S that has now been released in the UK with a price that won’t exactly break the bank.

UK carrier Three now has the handset available to UK consumers for no upfront costs starting on price plans costing only £17 per month, but the company also has the HTC 8S available on Pay As You Go for only £179.99 with deliveries expected to be fulfilled by Tuesday of next week.

At the time of writing rival carrier O2 just has the handset as coming soon with the option of receiving email updates, but no price details. Online mobile phone retailer Clove has the HTC 8S up for sale at £224.99 SIM free, which compares to rival retailer Expansys that has the same device on offer for £239.99 including shipping.

Online shopping giant Amazon meanwhile is listing the smartphone for £239 including delivery, and Phones4U and the Carphone Warehouse both have the handset on offer with a variety of carriers including Orange and Vodafone also free on contracts starting at £21 per month.

To recap the HTC 8S is the lower spec Windows Phone 8 handset from the company and for your money you get a device that features a 4-inch Super LCD 2 display that provides a resolution of 800 x 400. The handset is powered by a dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor clocked at 1GHz with 512 of RAM, and there is also 4GB of on board storage that is expandable by up to 32GB via microSD.

Will you be getting the HTC 8S?