HTC Desire Eye

 

Look and feel

We are accustomed to thinking of metal-bodied smartphones as more beautiful than plastic ones, but frankly HTC - following in Nokia's footsteps - has been making some really gorgeous phones enclosed in polycarbonate shells. The Desire Eye is a looker with its two-tone matte plastic unibody.

The Desire Eye is IPX7 certified which means that it can be submerged in 1m of water for up to 30 minutes. HTC has managed this without adding a flap to cover the Micro-USB port on the bottom - an achievement in itself. A 3.5mm jack sits on the top. The right edge is crowded with the camera button, power button and  volume rocker which are almost flush with the edge, and as result the tactile feedback is not as good as we've come to expect. The left edge houses two trays - one for the microSD card and one for the Nano-SIM card.

Specifications and software

HTC doesn't skim on the hardware inside the Desire Eye. It has a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC with an Adreno 330 GPU. There is 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. The Desire Eye accepts microSD cards up to 128GB in capacity.

Just like shooter on the front, the rear camera has a 13-megapixel sensor and a dual-LED flash. Both have BSI sensors but the front camera has a f/2.2 aperture and 22mm wide angle lens, while the primary camera has a much better f/2.0 aperture and lesser 28mm wide angle lens. The Desire Eye has a ton of connectivity options including Bluetooth v4.0, NFC and Wi-Fi a/b/g/n. It can connect to 4G networks on the bands used by Indian telcos. 
HTC ships the phone with Android 4.4.4 and its Sense UI 6.0 skin on top. The skin is light and unobtrusive. The BlinkFeed news reader continues to be a polished affair compared to other copycats. Even HTC's Zoe video clip app has received updates that make it it slightly more fun to use than before. HTC adds a few third-party applications such as Twitter, Scribble and Polaris Office 5 which we found to be mostly useful. 

Camera

First of all, we are glad that HTC decided to go with a physical shutter button for the camera - a rarity these days. Unfortunately, using the camera shutter locks the autofocus. The default camera app by itself is rather easy to use and has quite a few nifty features, from 360-degree panoramas to a Split Capture mode. There is no Depth-of-Field mode, which we loved in the HTC Desire 816.

There is an HDR mode which works with both the front and the rear cameras. 

Priced at Rs. 35,990, the HTC Desire Eye. Design-wise, the Desire Eye dares to do something different and succeeds.