Rudderless HTC Creates ‘Metaverse’ Smartphone With NFT

HTC still makes smartphones for some reason. The company’s latest release is the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a 399 British Pound (~$486) mid-ranger that represents the company’s first smartphone of 2022.

HTC says this phone will somehow help you “enter the metaverse”as “the phone will take you to the future.”The metaverse is the latest buzzword that companies are spinning. It roughly means “associated with virtual reality”. The phone itself doesn’t seem to have any real VR features. HTC’s latest VR headset, the Vive Flow, uses 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.

Presumably, the buzzwords are meant to divert attention from the fact that the HTC Desire 22 Pro is a typical mid-range phone. It has a Snapdragon 695, 120Hz, 6.6-inch 2412×1080 LCD, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, and a 4520mAh battery. It has Android 12, a fingerprint scanner, wireless charging, a microSD slot, and an IP67 water resistance rating that HTC only describes as “splash-proof.”In terms of cameras, you have a 65MP main camera, a 13MP ultra-wide, a 5MP depth sensor, and a 32MP front camera. Curiously, HTC’s specs also list “Face ID”as a feature, which is an Apple trademark. HTC is probably referring to universal face recognition.

Developing HTC products based on buzzwords

HTC’s rather disjointed strategy is what I’ll call “fashion product development.”The company clings to every tech buzzword and vaguely touts it as a feature that will change everything, only to abandon the idea a year or two later. In 2014, the company’s innovation was the Internet of Things”, which the company interpreted as a camera without a viewfinder and a fitness bracelet that was never released. In 2015, a renewed obsession with VR led to HTC’s only successful new product line, the HTC Vive, though much of that success could be attributed to the involvement of gaming giant Valve. (Valve ditched HTC in favor of its second headset, and now HTC appears to have retired from the PC-VR market.) The company then got very excited about “5G.”Android device in an out-of-pocket smart display form factor.

Lately, what’s left of HTC’s smartphone division has shifted this goofy product strategy to smartphones. In 2017, the company touted AI and machine learning as the future, promising that the HTC U Ultra would lead to a complete “transformation”of the company. In 2019 came the HTC Exodus, a “blockchain phone” that could run a full-fledged bitcoin node, a highly inappropriate use case for a slow, battery-powered, memory-limited mobile device. Now we have a Metaverse phone, and by the way, the company has already revealed that its next game will be with augmented reality.

We always ask the same questions about this smartphone trick: how does it make a phone better? Why would anyone want this? Why is this advantage over your competitors? HTC never gives satisfactory answers. To the extent that these phones do do anything related to their marketing buzzwords, the integration is usually just a piece of bundled software—an app you could just as easily install on a better phone from a serious manufacturer. It’s the same story with this metaverse phone, which simply comes preloaded with the publicly available HTC Vive app.

Oh, by the way, we have another buzzword for you: NFT, which, of course, is also in this phone. A few months ago, HTC launched the Vive Arts NFT store, and this phone has an app called Vive Wallet. Most of the “NFT”calls are related to a pyramid scheme where people buy bad art URLs for absurd amounts of money. HTC describes its NFT store as “designed for arts and culture,”and in this case, it showed someone viewing an image of Mona Lisa’s cat from their smartphone.

So far, the only confirmed availability countries are the UK and Taiwan. In the UK, the HTC Desire 22 Pro is now open for pre-order and will go on sale August 1st.