Hands-on: HTC Desire Eye
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Hands-on: HTC Desire Eye
HTC's selfie camera
HTC is the latest manufacturer to jump on the selfie bandwagon with the launch of the HTC Desire Eye, a smartphone with two 13MP cameras, one on the front and one on the back.
Despite being part of the mid-range Desire line, the Desire Eye boasts pretty impressive specs. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and 2GB RAM as HTC's flagship HTC One (M8), and its 5.2-inch Full HD screen looks as good as any other flagship smartphone on the market, with good viewing angles and a bright, crisp display.
One area where the Desire Eye doesn't hold up quite as well to more premium smartphones is its build. The phone sports a unibody plastic chassis that is well-built, but looks and feels a bit cheap. The unit we looked at had bright red edges with a matte white back and, honestly, looked and felt a bit like a toy. On the plus side, the matte finish makes the phone easy to hold and the unibody design makes the Desire Eye IP57 rated against dust and water.
The stand out feature of the Desire Eye is its front-facing camera. The rear camera actually isn't that impressive, as it doesn't have the Duo camera or Ultrapixel technology of the HTC One (M8), and is essentially the same camera found on the cheaper HTC One (E8). The front-facing camera, on the other hand, stands out simply because at 13MP, it's currently the highest resolution front-facing camera available. The large camera is very noticeable on the front of the phone and includes dual flash LED and a back-illuminated sensor for better autofocus in low-light conditions.
To take full advantage of its high-resolution front camera, the Desire Eye will be the first phone to roll out with HTC's new Eye Experience app. This app includes a new mode to let you take a picture with both the front and rear cameras at the same time, similar to the popular FrontBack app, as well as a few gimmicky modes, including Crop-me-in, which takes your picture from the front-facing camera and inserts you into the picture taken with the rear-facing camera, and a weird face-merge feature that lets you merge your facial features with another person's. Maybe useful for couples that want to see what their future children will look like?
There's also a new face-tracking feature for video calls that zooms in and crop the image to a caller's visage and can support up to four different people in the same room and voice-activated options for taking selfies or recording videos.
Testing the Desire Eye out, its fast processor keeps it snappy and responsive, and we didn't encounter any delays when taking pictures or videos. The pictures we took were all in the same light settings and were reasonably good, however we didn't find ourselves blown away by the Desire Eye's picture quality, and its selfies didn't look noticeably better than any other smartphone front-facing camera. However, we'll reserve final judgement for when we can get our hands on a review unit.
The Eye Experience app HTC will also be rolling out to the HTC One (M7), HTC One (M8), HTC One E8, HTC One mini, HTC One mini 2, HTC One max, HTC Desire 816, HTC Desire 820, and HTC Butterfly 2 in the coming months.
The rest of the Desire Eye's software is the same as the HTC One M8, as it runs on the same Android 4.4 KitKat OS with HTC's Sense 6.0 interface.
The big question that remains for the HTC Desire Eye is how much HTC plans on charging for it. Strangely enough, no pricing information was revealed today. While it has flagship specs, its plastic build should make it substantially cheaper than the all metal HTC One (M8) and somewhere closer to the HTC One (E8).
