It hasn’t launched a aggressive flagship gadget in years, however HTC’s smartphone division isn’t dropping by the wayside simply but. Right this moment it introduced the HTC Need 22 Professional, a follow-up to final yr’s HTC Need 21 Professional, and the corporate’s large try at capitalizing on the so-called metaverse. Within the UK, it’s listed at £399 and can ship on August 1st.
There are a few completely different features to the cellphone’s metaverse performance. To start out with, it’s designed to be the “excellent companion” to HTC’s just lately introduced Vive Movement VR headset and used to entry Viverse, HTC’s tackle the metaverse. The headset is designed to work with any Android cellphone, although, so it’s not totally clear what the Need 22 Professional provides that isn’t accessible elsewhere.
There’s additionally some NFT performance right here, with HTC’s Taiwanese web site promoting that the cellphone features a digital pockets to handle crypto property, and comes with a free NFT. This seems to fluctuate by market, nonetheless, since related language isn’t current within the advertising supplies on its UK web site.
Elsewhere, the Need 22 Professional’s specs are completely midrange. It’s bought a 6.6-inch 1080p show with a excessive 120Hz refresh fee, and a hole-punch notch in its high left containing a 32-megapixel selfie digicam. Round again there are three rear cameras, a 64-megapixel primary 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 Need 22 Professional is available in both black or gold.
The method may be very harking back to HTC’s earlier blockchain-powered smartphone, the Exodus 1, which it launched in 2018, and adopted up with the extra reasonably priced Exodus 1S the next yr. However neither cellphone seems to have reversed HTC’s smartphone fortunes. The corporate’s market share reportedly plummeted to lower than half a % in 2018, the identical yr it offered a lot of its smartphone expertise to Google. These days, HTC sells so few smartphones that it doesn’t register on public smartphone market share trackers.