It hasn’t launched a aggressive flagship machine in years, however HTC’s smartphone division isn’t falling by the wayside simply but. At the moment it introduced the HTC Want 22 Professional, a follow-up to final yr’s HTC Want 21 Professional, and the corporate’s massive 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 “good companion” to HTC’s lately introduced Vive Move 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 fully clear what the Want 22 Professional presents that isn’t accessible elsewhere.
There’s additionally some NFT performance right here, with HTC’s Taiwanese website promoting that the cellphone features a digital pockets to handle crypto belongings, and comes with a free NFT. This seems to range by market, nevertheless, since related language is just not current within the advertising supplies on its UK website.
Elsewhere, the Want 22 Professional’s specs are totally midrange. It’s bought a 6.6-inch 1080p show with a excessive 120Hz refresh fee, and a hole-punch notch in its prime left containing a 32-megapixel selfie digicam. Round again there are three rear cameras, a 64-megapixel essential 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 Want 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 inexpensive 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 bought 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.