HTC, the maker of Android smartphones, has a surprising tablet to accompany its exotic, metaverse-focused Desire 22 Pro. The new A101 is an Android tablet with a 10.1-inch screen, entry-level specs, and a design inspired right from the middle of the last decade. the device that we spotted via AndroidLooks like it was quietly announced last month. According to the Wayback Machine – It targets the African market. Follows the A100 tablet, which was Launched in Russia last year For no similar reaction.
Given that the tablet appears to be only marketed in emerging markets, I don’t want to be reckless about its specs or design. But it’s still strange to see HTC — makers of the first-ever Android phone, and a company that Google previously entrusted with building a Nexus-branded tablet (Nexus 9) — produce forgettable devices like this one. The A101 even runs on Android 11 of 2020 out of the box, instead of Android 12 or later Big Screen Android 12L.
Internally, the HTC tablet is powered by a Unisoc T618 processor, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, expandable via microSD. It has a pair of cameras on the back, a 16MP main camera and a 2MP ultrawide camera. There’s a 5MP front camera, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 7000mAh battery, and face unlock support on both models.
All in all, a very strange version of HTC. This is a company that once dealt with the likes of Samsung in the leading Android market. But now, in 2022, he could quietly reveal a completely unimpressive tablet on his website and make most of the world not notice until days later.
Meanwhile, the smartphone design talent HTC sold to Google in early 2018 has gone from strength to strength over the past two years. While the Pixel 4 is now seen as a bug, the Pixel 5 was a very capable mid-range phone, and the Pixel 6 was a competitive flagship (although it apparently had more than its fair share of software bugs). In contrast, it’s getting harder to tell what HTC’s remaining smartphone division is working on beyond obscure buzzwords like “metaverse.”
Update July 5th at 11:35AM ET: Updated to indicate that the A101 tablet is new, but the A100 tablet was launched last year in Russia.
