HTC quietly introduced a brand new Android pill — and no one seen

HTC, the once-impressive Android smartphone producer, has a shock pill to accompany its weird metaverse-focused Desire 22 Pro. The new A100 (or A101, relying in your area) is an Android pill with a ten.1-inch show, entry-level specs, and a design that’s straight out of the center of the final decade. The gadget, which we spotted via AndroidPolice, seems to have been quietly introduced final month — according to the Wayback Machine — and is destined for Africa, Latin America, and Russia, the place it’s priced at 20,990 rubles, aka a weirdly uncompetitive $337.

Given that the pill seems to be marketed solely at rising markets, I don’t wish to be too snarky about its specs or design. But it’s simply plain bizarre to see HTC — makers of actually the first-ever Android cellphone and an organization that Google as soon as entrusted to construct a Nexus-branded pill (the Nexus 9) — producing forgettable gadgets like this. The A100 even runs 2020’s Android 11 out of the field, quite than Android 12 or the big-screen focused Android 12L.

Internally, HTC’s pill is powered by a Unisoc T618 processor, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, expandable by way of microSD. It’s obtained a pair of cameras on its rear. On the A101 there’s a primary 16-megapixel digital camera with a 2-megapixel ultrawide, however the A100 pairs a 13-megapixel primary with a 2-megapixel ultrawide. There’s a 5-megapixel front-facing digital camera, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 7,000mAh battery, and assist for face unlock on each fashions.

All in all, a really bizarre launch from HTC. This is an organization that was as soon as going toe to toe with the likes of Samsung within the flagship Android market. But now, in 2022, it will possibly quietly reveal a totally unimpressive pill on its web site and have a lot of the world not discover till a month later.

Meanwhile, the smartphone design expertise that HTC bought off to Google in early 2018 has been going from power to power over the past couple of years. While the Pixel 4 is now considered a misstep, the Pixel 5 was a really succesful midrange handset, and the Pixel 6 was a aggressive flagship (albeit one with seemingly greater than its justifiable share of software program bugs). In distinction, it’s getting more durable and more durable to inform what HTC’s remaining smartphone division is working in direction of past imprecise buzzwords just like the “metaverse.”