Now I don’t mean to take cheap shots at the company, but HTC hasn’t been doing too much since the Vive. Their phones haven’t gained much traction in the past few years as Samsung, LG, Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oneplus and the other companies have gradually overtaken it and a few other legacy brands over the last couple of years… but HTC’s latest phone may just be a game-changer, or it may be another failed attempt at greatness… either which way, it’s worth addressing that HTC has put some serious innovation into its latest phone. Behold the Exodus, a phone that’s touted as HTC’s most secure phone yet, designed to facilitate cryptocurrency trading and be, in itself, a secure wallet for your crypto-coins. Titled Zion, this wallet and its contents are kept on a ‘partitioned’ part of the HTC’s storage, away from Android. In the occasion that you misplace your phone or your keys, HTC allows you to recover your crypto-coins by storing parts of these keys with trusted friends/contacts. HTC will use a secret sharing algorithm to send the info to your friends, which you can then piece together, in the event that you lose your access keys or the smartphone. Other than that, the phone comes with specs that allow it to stand among flagships from other companies. You’ve got a 6-inch HD+ display with an 18:9 aspect ratio, along with dual front-facing cameras as well as dual rear cameras (because portrait-mode is bae) that are capable of capturing 4K video at 60fps. The phone also comes with 6gb of RAM and 128GB of storage… and just in case you fling your phone into a swimming pool the minute crypto-coin values tank, the phone boasts of IP68 waterproofing! The buzz around the phone is real, although the demand may not be as great. HTC is currently letting you preorder the Exodus (shipping in December) and is accepting only Bitcoin and Ethereum as payment. Real smooth! While I doubt the phone will be a runaway hit, I admit that it does something that could be considered breakthrough. Creating a data partition for storing sensitive information that is out of the access of the Android OS is definitely something worth marveling and respecting. Maybe we’ll see phones with such remarkable security in the future, which mitigate the chances of malicious hacks and data-theft! Designer: