It hasn’t launched a competitive flagship device in years, but HTC’s smartphone division isn’t throwing in the towel yet. Today it announced the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a follow-up to last year’s HTC Desire 21 Pro, and the company’s big attempt to capitalize on the so-called metavers. In the UK, it comes out at £ 399 and will ship on 1 August.
There are a couple of different aspects to the functionality of the phone’s metavers. For starters, it’s designed to be the “perfect companion” to HTC’s recently announced Vive Flow VR headphones and is used to access Viverse, HTC’s metavers view. However, the headphones are designed to work with any Android phone, so it’s not entirely clear what the Desire 22 Pro offers that isn’t available elsewhere.
There are also some NFT features here, with HTC’s Taiwanese site announcing that the phone includes a digital wallet to manage cryptographic assets and includes a free NFT. This seems to vary by market, however, as there is no language similar to the marketing materials of your UK site.
Elsewhere, the specifications of the Desire 22 Pro are completely mid-range. It has a 6.6-inch 1080p display with a high refresh rate of 120 Hz and a punch notch in the top left that contains a 32-megapixel selfie camera. On the back are three rear cameras, a 64-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 5-megapixel depth sensor.
Internally it works with a Snapdragon 695 processor, with 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage and a 4,520 mAh battery. It supports wireless and reverse charging, runs Android 12 and has an IP67 rating of dust and water resistance. The Desire 22 Pro comes in black or gold.
The approach is very reminiscent of HTC’s previous blockchain smartphone, the Exodus 1, which it launched in 2018, and continued with the more affordable Exodus 1S the following year. But neither phone seems to have reversed the fortunes of HTC smartphones. The company’s market share reportedly plummeted to less than half a percent in 2018, the same year it sold much of its smartphone talent to Google. Today, HTC sells so few smartphones that it does not register with public smartphone market share trackers.