HTC’s smartphone division limps on with metaverse-focused Desire 22 Pro

It hasn’t launched a aggressive flagship gadget in years, however HTC’s smartphone division isn’t chucking up the sponge simply but. Today it introduced the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a follow-up to final 12 months’s HTC Desire 21 Pro, and the corporate’s massive try at capitalizing on the so-called metaverse. In the UK, it’s listed at £399 and can ship on August 1st.

There are a few completely different facets to the telephone’s metaverse performance. To begin with, it’s designed to be the “perfect companion” to HTC’s not too long ago introduced Vive Flow VR headset and used to entry Viverse, HTC’s tackle the metaverse. The headset is designed to work with any Android telephone, although, so it’s not totally clear what the Desire 22 Pro provides that isn’t obtainable elsewhere.

There’s additionally some NFT performance right here, with HTC’s Taiwanese website promoting that the telephone features a digital pockets to handle crypto belongings, and comes with a free NFT. This seems to differ by market, nevertheless, since comparable language will not be current within the advertising supplies on its UK website.

Elsewhere, the Desire 22 Pro’s specs are totally midrange. It’s bought a 6.6-inch 1080p show with a excessive 120Hz refresh price, and a hole-punch notch in its high left containing a 32-megapixel selfie digicam. Around again there are three rear cameras, a 64-megapixel predominant digicam, a 13-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel depth sensor.

Internally it’s powered by a Snapdragon 695 processor, with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a 4,520mAh battery. It helps wi-fi and reverse wi-fi charging, runs Android 12, and has an IP67 score for mud and water resistance. The Desire 22 Pro is available in both black or gold.

The method could be very paying homage to HTC’s earlier blockchain-powered smartphone, the Exodus 1, which it launched in 2018, and adopted up with the extra inexpensive Exodus 1S the next 12 months. But neither telephone seems to have reversed HTC’s smartphone fortunes. The firm’s market share reportedly plummeted to less than half a percent in 2018, the identical 12 months it offered a lot of its smartphone expertise to Google. Nowadays, HTC sells so few smartphones that it doesn’t register on public smartphone market share trackers.