Selfies are the latest trend that smartphone manufacturers and app developers are looking forward to capitalize upon. Sony, not too long ago, introduced Xperia C3 that boasted a 5MP secondary camera coupled with a soft-tone LED flash. HTC is the latest smartphone manufacturer to jump up the bandwagon with a heavy-duty selfie-shooter of its own, branded HTC Desire Eye.
Before moving on to the star of the show, let’s get the mandatory specs-list out of the way. HTC Desire Eye is meant to be a plastic-clad mid-ranger with colorful accents but under-the-hood composition is aptly brawny at the same time:
- 5.2-inch, HD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 (424 ppi)
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset; 2.3 GHz quad-core Krait 400 CPU
- Adreno 330 GPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 16 GB internal memory; microSD card slot for upto 128 GB expansion
- 13 MP primary, 13 MP secondary cameras with dual-tone LED flash
- Front-facing stereo speakers
- Android v4.4.2 KitKat with Sense 6 UI
- 3G, 4G, Bluetooth v4, Wi-Fi, NFC, microUSB v2 connectivity
- IPX7 certification for dust and water resistance
- Non user-removable 2,400 mAh battery
Now let’s get back to the elephant in the room: the front-facing beefy selfie cam. HTC Desire Eye features a 13 mega-pixel secondary camera that sits right at the top-center of its front façade, flanked by a dual-tone LED flash and microphones on the either sides. A practically similar camera is also present of the back-panel: 13 MP shooter complete with dual-color flash ansd all. Both primary and secondary camera feature autofocus, HDR modes, and 1080p video recording.
HTC has packed in some specialized software features to go along with the unusual hardware as well. The front cam can utilize a number of built-in apps, packaged as HTC Eye Experience, to up their selfie game. These apps include:
- Split Capture, a feature that lets the user take pictures or record videos from both primary and secondary cameras simultaneously.
- Auto & Voice Selfies: Users can either pick their smartphone upto the face-level to automatically trigger a selfie shot, or utter the voice command the take the shot or start recording the video.
- Face Tracking: The camera follows and crops the user’s face to always keep it in focus during the video chat.
- Crop-Me-In lets the user capture photo from both cameras simultaneously and embeds the front-cam selfie into the scene captured through main camera.
- Face Fusion fuses the faces of two people into one. We aren’t particularly sure about what exactly does this ‘feature’ aim to achieve but perhaps couples could take fused photos to see what their kids might look like.
- Live Makeup lets the selfie-shooter apply filters in real-time to see how the final picture will turn out.
The HTC Eye Experience package of apps will be made available for other HTC smartphones as well in the near future, including HTC One M8, HTC One M7, HTC One E8, HTC One mini, HTC One mini 2, HTC One Max, HTC Desire 816, HTC Desire 820, and HTC Butterfly 2.
HTC Desire Eye will be made available worldwide starting in October later this year. The price of the device has not been disclosed as of yet.
