FP StaffJun 13, 2022 15:36:52 IST
There was a time when HTC was making some of the best Android smartphones and would go toe to toe against some of the biggest names in the industry. Samsung, Sony, OnePlus, Motorola – HTC had some great products that made them a really competitive brand.
A few years ago, however, the Taiwanese company, sort of disappeared from the smartphone market. In India, the devices from HTC were particularly popular among the tech community mainly because they offered some of the best hardware, along with a clean Android experience. HTC lost its ground and sold a large part of its smartphone operations to Google in 2017-18.
They are all set to make a comeback this month, with their upcoming handset, which they will be announcing on June 28.
HTC will be making their comeback with a new phone dedicated to the metaverse and has decided to call it, the Viverse.
Apart from the date of the announcement, there’s not a lot of information out there. HTC announced its Viverse brand in March 2022 to mark its ambitions for the metaverse. To that end, the way to go forward for HTC is to launch a varied line of products based on the concepts of web3 and the metaverse itself.
A couple of years ago, HTC had attempted something similar when they launched the HTC Exodus and HTC Exodus 1s. These were some of the first smartphones to support blockchain technology and were designed as a digital wallet that would carry Bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency.
But because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies weren’t nearly as popular back then as they are now, the niche focus of building a smartphone solely around crypto never really took off.
Now with the metaverse on the horizon, for better or worse, HTC wants to give its lofty smartphone ambitions another shot. HTC’s metaverse phone was supposed to debut back in April, but COVID-19 outbreaks in Taiwan forced HTC to delay its reveal.
Not a lot is known about the specifications of the upcoming HTC Viverse, but what we do know is that the new smartphone will be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8-series chipset. It will also support HTC Vive AR and VR headsets
