HTC Pivots From Blockchain To the Metaverse for its Next Smartphone Gimmick

HTC's slow-motion fall from smartphone grace is reportedly set to continue in 2022, with the company said to be working on a new "metaverse"-focused phone in April as the remnants of the once-flagship smartphone company continues to desperately cling to whatever zeitgeist term it can to stay afloat, according to DigiTimes. The Verge: The news comes from Charles Huang, HTC's general manager for the Asia-Pacific region, who reportedly commented at MWC 2022 that the company would be introducing a new high-end smartphone next month with unspecified "metaverse" features. Details are slim, including any specs, markets it'll be released in, or even what kind of AR or VR features the new device will offer. The news sounds a lot like HTC's last major pivot towards relevancy: its Exodus line of blockchain phones that its offered for the past few years. Promising decentralized apps ("Dapps") and a built-in cryptocurrency wallet, the phones could run blockchain nodes and even mine paltry amounts of cryptocurrency, but -- like many instances of blockchain technology -- it was a solution largely in search of a problem that never really took off.

Blockchain Phones !?!

[Tontoman]

What a oddity. What would it do -- you could snap a photo of your dinner and create an NFT automatically?

Re:

[BackwardPawn]

What a oddity. What would it do -- you could snap a photo of your dinner and create an NFT automatically?

You should check out the product Website: HTC Exodus [htcexodus.com]. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was an April Fools joke.

"Rebuilding trust, one phone at at time." Maybe its not a good idea to advertise that you lost trust in the first place. And they've chosen a funny way to rebuild it.

Re: Blockchain Phones !?!

[Renaissance Slacker]

I own an HTC product - the Original Vive VR set. While itâ(TM)s a great piece of tech and I have no complaints, I have heard tons of horror stories from Vive users who had to heal with HTC for repairs. On that front, HTC makes Comcastâ(TM)s customer service look cutting edge. Things like, losing items shipped back for repair; âoefindingâ them after months of denying receipt, despite charging owners for repair of received items; returning the item months later, in the original unopened bo

Inept

[rpnx]

Inept management at HTC. Add this to the lame tech stocks list.

Pass....on anything from HTC

[MrBigInThePants]

They have lost their way. No relevent anymore and likely never will be again thanks to dysfunctional management.

Re:

[luvirini]

They lost their way a while back, but strangely enough keep trying with strange things like this..

360 stereo camera

[backslashdot]

Is there any easy to use 360 degree stereo camera that you can walk around with? I imagine it would require insane image stabilization magic along with a bunch of cameras to capture different perspectives just to get rid of bouncy movement artifacts that come from walking. Maybe it will have to be worn as a jacket containing 10 cameras.

Viveverse

[Xylantiel]

Maybe important to keep in mind that HTC is basically the only real competitor to (the company formerly known as) Facebook in the VR hardware space. Microsoft might also eventually step up since they do have a functional hardware line, and the consoles are making some plays at the low end, but we will see. HTC recently launched what they are calling the "Viveverse", which I think is their social VR platform. Note there is already effectively a cross-hardware social VR platform centered around Steam (whic

Re:

[Catvid-22]

Well FB's trademark is for Meta not metaverse. So it's more like the Athlon trademark that AMD has for its CPU. Both "meta" and "athlon" are transliterations of Greek words but rarely used as such in English. These two morphemes [wikipedia.org] are used more often as prefixes or suffixes in words such as "pentathlon" or "metaphor".

Our Blockchains are out of this Metaverse!

[sound+vision]

That's a fly crypto wallet sagging off your blockchain!
Allow me to give you Dapps, bro!