HTC has certainly distanced itself from the smartphone sector, but that does not necessarily mean that the Taiwanese manufacturer has abandoned it entirely. In an interview given to DigiTimes (via WinFuture) During MWC 2022, Charles Huang, general manager for the Asia-Pacific region, said that the firm could launch a rather high-end model as early as April.
It had been several years since the brand had announced one. We recall that, in 2018, nearly 2,000 engineers from HTC had joined the Research & Development department at Google to continue to extend the Pixel range.
According to Huang, this new Android device would have functionalities “metaverse focused”. A catch-all term that designates the bridge between the virtual and real worlds. However, none of the features in question have been specified. Ditto for the technical sheet, still unknown.
Let the experience speak
We can nevertheless expect the Taiwanese to highlight its know-how in terms of virtual and augmented reality. The brand was able to demonstrate this with the different iterations of its HTC Vive headset, developed in collaboration with Valve. The latest model remains today one of the most successful products in this sector.
The company also took advantage of the Barcelona show to unveil its own metaverse, named Viveverse, and offer a gallery of applications common to its products. We therefore imagine that this mobile will be able to navigate between some of them.
This isn’t the first time HTC has tried to stand out in the smartphone market with recently publicized technology. The brand had tried its luck with the Exodus 1, a model supposed to take advantage of the blockchainoffering in particular the possibility of storing its crypto-assets in a more secure way.
It is not yet known if this smartphone will be marketed in Europe. If the April date is confirmed, we should nevertheless hear about it very quickly. It remains to be seen what the real ambitions of the firm are on this subject.