HTC announces its first Windows Phone 8 phones

They just keep on coming, don’t they?

Everywhere you turn, there’s a newly announced smartphone. For the most part, they’re rehashes of previous handsets these days. It’s either a Galaxy phone or an Xperia phone or an iPhone.

Thus it comes as somewhat of a refreshing change of pace to see a company – other than Nokia – introducing a new line of phones designed for Microsoft’s mobile operating system.

The simply-titled 8X phone is HTC’s newest entry in the world of Windows Phone. It has a 4.3-inch Super LCD 2 display, a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, and 1 GB of RAM. It gives users a comfortable 16 GB of storage space.

It isn’t the most amazing phone from a technical standpoint, but that is what the Windows Phone category has come to represent – solid, middle-of-the-road phones that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

The company also introduced the 8S, a similar phone but with only a 1 GHz processor, 4-inch display, and 512 MB of RAM. It also only has 4 GB of storage.

Unlike HTC’s traditional Android products, these Windows Phone gadgets make a visual statement, as they have bright, neon-like colors.

Nokia is still the champion of the Windows Phone market, but that is increasingly like being the captain of the Titanic. HTC hopes it can help steer the Windows Phone ship clear of the iceberg and steal Nokia’s thunder in this still-very-niche segment of the smartphone industry.