Enlarge / phone metavers of HTC.
HTC
Somehow, HTC still makes smartphones. The company’s latest is the HTC Desire 22 Pro, an average range of 399 British pounds (~ $ 486) that represents the company’s first smartphone in 2022.
HTC says this phone will help you in some way to “get into the metavers,” like “the phone that will take you into the future.” The metavers is the latest buzzword that tech companies have been promoting. It is used roughly to mean “related to virtual reality”. The phone itself does not seem to have any real virtual reality feature. HTC’s latest VR glasses, the Vive Flow, use an Android phone as a controller and can display the phone’s screen within the VR environment. This phone includes the Vive Flow driver app, but you can install it on any Android phone that supports Miracast and get the same features.
Presumably, the fashion tricks are a distraction from the fact that the HTC Desire 22 Pro is a mid-range phone with a generic look. It has a Snapdragon 695, a 120 Hz LCD screen, 6.6 inches, 2412 × 1080, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage and a 4520 mAh battery. It has Android 12, a fingerprint reader, wireless charging, a microSD slot, and an IP67 water resistance rating, which HTC only describes as “splash-proof.” For the cameras, you have a 65 MP main camera, a 13 MP ultra-wide camera, a 5 MP depth sensor and a 32 MP front camera. Interestingly, HTC’s spec sheet also includes “Face ID” as a feature, which is a trademark of Apple. HTC probably means generic facial recognition.
Enlarge / At least HTC’s promotional artwork is nice.
HTC
Product development based on HTC fashion words
HTC’s rather disarticulated strategy is what I’ll call “fashion product development”. The company clings to whatever the latest tech word is and vaguely promotes it as a feature that will change everything, only to rule out the idea a year or two later. In 2014, the company’s new adventure was “Internet of Things,” which it interpreted as a camera without a viewfinder and a fitness band that was never released. In 2015, a new obsession with virtual reality led to HTC’s only new product line, the HTC Vive, although you could attribute most of that success to the participation of Valve, the masterpiece of PC Games (Valve ruled out HTC for its second handset, and now HTC seems to have left the PC-VR market.) Then the company was very excited about the “5G”, so its next big product was a 5G hotspot that cost a whopping $ 600, thank you. mainly for being a complete flagship Android device with the non-refundable form factor of a smart screen.
Announcements
Lately, what’s left of HTC’s smartphone division has brought this rudderless product strategy to smartphones. In 2017, the company promoted AI and machine learning as the future, promising that the HTC U Ultra would lead to a total “transformation” of the company. In 2019 he brought the HTC Exodus, a “Blockchain phone” that could run a full Bitcoin node, a very inappropriate use case for a slow, battery-powered, limited-storage mobile device. We now have the Metaverse phone and by the way, the company has already indicated that their next adventure will be with augmented reality.
We always ask the same questions of this fashion word trick for smartphones: how does this improve the phone? Why would anyone want that? Why is this a selling point over your competitors? HTC never has satisfactory answers. To the extent that these phones really do anything related to their fashion marketing words, integration is usually just a piece of software included, an application that you could just as easily install on a better phone from a manufacturer. serious. It’s the same story for this metavers phone, which has just been installed with the HTC Vive app available to anyone.
Enlarge / The “Live Wallet” allows you to see all those NFT images that you definitely do not regret buying.
HTC
Oh, by the way, we have one more fashionable word for you: NFT, which this phone also has, of course. In fact, HTC launched the “Vive Arts NFT store” a few months ago, and this phone has an app called Vive Wallet. Most “NFT” invocations involve a pyramid scheme where people buy URLs of bad artwork for absurd amounts of money. HTC describes its NFT store as “designed for the arts and culture” and in this case showed it to someone who saw a photo of a Mona Lisa cat from their smartphone.
So far, the only countries confirmed for availability appear to be the UK and Taiwan. In the UK, the HTC Desire 22 Pro is now bookable and will ship on August 1st.