HTC, the once-impressive Android smartphone producer, has a shock pill to accompany its weird metaverse-focused Desire 22 Pro. The new A101 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 aimed on the African market. It follows the A100 pill, which was launched in Russia last year to the same non-reaction.

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 nonetheless 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 A101 even runs 2020’s Android 11 out of the field, fairly 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 bought a pair of cameras on its rear, a essential 16-megapixel digicam with a 2-megapixel ultrawide. There’s a 5-megapixel front-facing digicam, 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 could possibly quietly reveal a completely unimpressive pill on its web site and have a lot of the world not discover till days later.

Meanwhile, the smartphone design expertise that HTC offered off to Google in early 2018 has been going from energy to energy during the last 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 the direction of past imprecise buzzwords just like the “metaverse.”

Update July fifth, 11:35AM ET: Updated to notice that the A101 pill is new, however that the A100 pill launched final yr in Russia.