It hasn’t launched a competitive flagship tool in years, but HTC’s smartphone division isn’t chucking up the sponge honest but. Nowadays it presented the HTC Prefer 22 Professional, a tradition-as much as closing year’s HTC Prefer 21 Professional, and the company’s colossal try at capitalizing on the so-known as metaverse. In the UK, it’s listed at £399 and must always ship on August 1st.

There are about a diversified aspects to the phone’s metaverse functionality. To launch up with, it’s designed to be the “perfect companion” to HTC’s nowadays presented Vive Movement VR headset and frail to accumulate entry to Viverse, HTC’s take hold of on the metaverse. The headset is designed to work with any Android phone, though, so it’s no longer completely certain what the Prefer 22 Professional provides that isn’t on hand in diversified locations.

There’s additionally some NFT functionality right here, with HTC’s Taiwanese residing selling that the phone contains a digital wallet to control crypto sources, and is derived with a free NFT. This seems to alter by market, nonetheless, since similar language is no longer relate in the promoting and marketing supplies on its UK residing.

In diversified locations, the Prefer 22 Professional’s specs are completely midrange. It’s obtained a 6.6-high-tail 1080p relate with a high 120Hz refresh fee, and a gap-punch notch in its top left containing a 32-megapixel selfie digicam. Around motivate there are three rear cameras, a 64-megapixel fundamental 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 Prefer 22 Professional is accessible in either dim or gold.

The means is amazingly akin to HTC’s old blockchain-powered smartphone, the Exodus 1, which it launched in 2018, and followed up with the extra within your means Exodus 1S the following year. However neither phone seems to own reversed HTC’s smartphone fortunes. The company’s market part reportedly plummeted to lower than half a p.c in 2018, the same year it equipped great of its smartphone capability to Google. This relate day, HTC sells so few smartphones that it doesn’t register on public smartphone market part trackers.