Full HD screen, very fine selfie camera with flash, powerful processor
On the chunky side
HTC has no shortage of handsets in its Desire series, but the Desire Eye is the first to properly recognise the power of the selfie with 13-megapixel cameras on both front and back. But do the rest of its features live up to the promise?
The body is two-tone polycarbonate, with a different coloured strip running around the sides. It feels soft and warm to the touch, which many may prefer to the chilly tones of glass and metal on many of today's high-enders.
Screen & chassis Considering the screen is a reasonably modest 5.2in, the Desire Eye feels like a big beast. At just a sliver under 9mm thick it feels chunky and less than svelte, despite the relatively narrow bezels around the sides of the screen. That screen however is a good one. With a full HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (424ppi), images and colours fairly pop out at you and there's more than enough sharp detail to at least keep pace with just about anything else out there. It's big enough and sharp enough for hassle-free HD movie watching and if you don't fancy using headphones, the onboard BoomSound speakers sound pretty good too.
The SIM card and 128GB microSD memory card slots are protected by rubbery grommets (though not the headphone jack or microUSB port, which are left conveniently uncovered). As a result, we're promised that it's dustproof and water resistant to 1m for 30 minutes -- certainly a dip in the sink appeared to do it no harm at all.
Software & processor Down in the engine room there's a quad-core processor clocked at 2.3GHz and backed by 2GB RAM. That might not be up there with the very hottest of today's rods, but it's more than enough to cope with HD movie watching and gameplay -- we didn't encounter any slow downs or stuttering whatever we were doing. Our AnTuTu benchmark test gave it a score of 41,602, which puts it in very good company along with the likes of Sony's Xperia Z3, though it trails Samsung's exemplary Galaxy Alpha.
The latest HTC Sense 6 interface is laid over the top of the not-quite-latest Android 4.4 KitKat, though there's a Lollipop upgrade expected. Sense manages that clever trick of inveigling itself into just about every facet of the interface without seeming to get in the way. It looks good, is intuitive to find your way around and doesn't seem to slow things up -- good work HTC.
Photography
The 13 megapixel camera sees a return to standard pixels after HTC's experiments with 'less but bigger' pixels over the last year or so. There's auto focus and a dual LED flash, plus a feast of extras like Face Tracking, Screen Share, Split Capture and more.
It's nice, but the really interesting thing about the Eye is that its front-facing, selfie-focused camera has the same pixel count as the one on the back. That's 13 megapixels dedicated to taking snaps of your own sweet self in all your glory. There's a slightly different configuration though, with a smaller wide angle lens (22mm instead of 28mm), though there's another dual LED flash to improve those 'in-da-club' selfies.
But while there are a lot of options to play with, the picture quality for either isn't up there with the best and the auto settings aren't always reliable, too often delivering saturated colours and not enough detail. That said, this is still head and shoulders above most selfie cameras out there.
The 2400mAh battery held up reasonably well but didn't do much to distinguish itself - expect to get a bit over a day of heavyish use out of it, but not much more.
Conclusion The spec is downgraded a little from the HTC One (M8) with no IR blaster which would allow you to use it as a remote control or a barometer so you can measure elevation for your fitness apps. This is a perfectly fine phone with a solidly dependable spec but it's the 13 megapixel selfie camera with all its attendant extras that makes it special.
Software: Google Android 4.4.4 KitKat
Processor: Quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801
Memory slot: Yes
Display: 5.2in LCD, 1920x1080 pixels
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
Camera: 13 megapixel with autofocus, dual LED flash, BSI sensor; 13 megapixel front-facing camera with autofocus, dual LED flash, BSI sensor
Video playback: 3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .mkv, .wmv, .avi
Audio playback: aac, .amr, .ogg, .m4a, .mid, .mp3, .flac, .wav, .wma
Radio: Yes
Battery: 2400mAh
Size: 152x74x9mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
