Since the tablet seems to be exclusively available in emerging markets, I don’t want to be too bad about its specs or design. But it’s still just weird to see HTC – makers of literally the first Android phone and a company that Google once trusted to make a Nexus-branded tablet (the Nexus 9) – produce forgotten devices like this. The A101 even runs 2020’s Android 11 out of the box, instead of the big-screen-focused Android 12 or Android 12L. It even runs an old version of Android 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 its back, a 16-megapixel main camera with a 2-megapixel ultra-wide camera. There’s a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, 7,000mAh battery and support for face unlock on both models. All in all, a very strange release from HTC. This is a company that once went toe-to-toe with the likes of Samsung in the flagship Android market. But now, in 2022, it can quietly unveil a completely unimpressive tablet on its website and not be noticed by most of the world until days later. Meanwhile, the smartphone design talent that HTC sold to Google in early 2018 has been steadily growing over the past two years. While the Pixel 4 is now seen as a mistake, the Pixel 5 was a very capable mid-range handset and the Pixel 6 was a competitive flagship (albeit one with seemingly more than its share of software bugs). Instead, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what the rest of HTC’s smartphone division is working on beyond vague words like “metabersian.” Update July 5, 11:35 a.m. ET: Updated to note that the A101 tablet is new, but that the A100 tablet was released last year in Russia.
