Zoom / Metaverse HTC phone.
HTC
HTC somehow still makes smartphones. The company’s latest is the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a mid-range of £ 399 (~ $ 486), which is the company’s first smartphone for 2022.
HTC says this phone will somehow help you “enter the metaverse,” like “the phone to take you into the future.” The metaverse is the latest technological fad that companies are moving. Approximately used to denote “VR-related”. The phone itself does not seem to have any actual VR features. HTC’s latest VR glasses, Vive Flow, use an Android phone as a controller and can display the phone’s screen in a VR environment. This phone comes with this Vive Flow controller app, but you can install it on any Android phone that supports miracast and get the same features.
Probably the fashion tricks are intended as a distraction from the fact that HTC Desire 22 Pro is a generic looking mid-range phone. It has a Snapdragon 695, 120 Hz, 6.6-inch, 2412 × 1080 LCD, 8GB RAM, 128GB memory and 4520 mAh battery. It has Android 12, a fingerprint reader, wireless charging, a microSD card slot and a degree of water resistance IP67, which HTC only describes as “splash resistant”. For the cameras you have a 65 MP main camera, 13 MP ultra wide, 5 MP depth sensor and 32 MP front camera. HTC’s specification also curiously lists “Face ID” as a feature that is a trademark of Apple. HTC probably means general face recognition.
Enlarge / At least HTC advertising works are good.
HTC
HTC’s product development driven by fashion words
HTC’s rather fragmented strategy is what I would call “fashion product development.” The company sticks to any of the latest technology and vaguely advertises it as a feature that will change everything just to dismiss the idea a year or two later. In 2014, the company’s hottest new action was the Internet of Things, which it interpreted as a camera without a viewfinder and a fitness tape that was never released. In 2015, a new VR craze brought HTC’s only successful new product line, the HTC Vive, although you can attribute much of that success to the involvement of computer game giant Valve. (Valve dropped HTC for its second handset, and now HTC seems to have left the PC-VR market.) The company was very excited about 5G after that, so its next big product was a 5G hotspot that cost a whopping $ 600, thanks to now be a full-fledged Android device in the pocket form factor of a smart display.
Advertising
Recently, what’s left of HTC’s smartphone division has brought this product strategy without steering wheels to smartphones. In 2017, the company advertised AI and machine learning as the future, promising that the HTC U Ultra would lead to a complete “transformation” of the company. 2019 brought the HTC Exodus, a “blockchain phone” that can manage a full bitcoin node, an extremely inappropriate use of batteries, a slow and limited storage mobile device. We now have the Metaverse phone and by the way, the company is already signaling that its next presentation will be augmented reality.
We always ask the same questions about this smartphone trick: How does it make the phone better? Why would anyone want that? Why is this a selling point to your competitors? HTC never has satisfactory answers. As long as these phones actually do something related to their marketing buzzwords, integration is usually just part of the included software – an application that you can just as easily install on a better phone from a major manufacturer. The same story is for this meta-universal phone, which has just been pre-installed with the HTC Vive available for every application.
Zoom / “Vive Wallet” allows you to see all those NFT photos that you definitely do not regret buying.
HTC
Oh, by the way, we have another buzzword for you: NFT, which this phone also has, of course. HTC actually launched the “Vive Arts NFT store” a few months ago and this phone has an app for it called Vive Wallet. Most calls to “NFTs” involve a pyramid scheme in which people buy URLs of bad artwork for absurd amounts of money. HTC describes its NFT store as “dedicated to arts and culture” and in this case it shows someone looking at a photo of a Mona Lisa cat from their smartphone.
So far, the only countries confirmed to be available appear to be the United Kingdom and Taiwan. In the UK, the HTC Desire 22 Pro is ready for pre-order now and will be delivered on August 1.
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