HTC has also announced its new Desire Eye, offering a large 13MP front camera to take on your selfie needs. As leaked earlier, the Desire Eye is a slightly bigger device with a 5.2″ Full HD screen that’s accompanied by its signature Boom Sound Stereo Speakers.
Being a Desire range, the Eye gets a youthful choice of colours with its doubleshot moulding process which results a colourful unibody plastic body. Underneath, it gets a respectable 2.3GHz Quad-Core Snapdragon 801 processor with 2GB of RAM along with 16GB of on-board storage that’s expandable via microSD.
Both front and back cameras shoot 13MP photos with Full HD 1080p video support and they also get dual-tone LED flash for each side. For the front camera, it gets a wide angle 20mm lens with a f/2.2 aperture, while its main rear camera gets a 28mm angle lens with a faster f/2.0 aperture.
Connectivity wise, it gets the usual Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, WiFi 802.11ac and 4G LTE support. Probably to avoid stepping over its premium HTC One range, the Desire Eye gets just 2,400mAh capacity for its battery. The Desire Eye is waterproof as well with an IPX7 rating that allows it to be submerged underwater up to 1 metre for 30 minutes. It is expected to arrive in Asia at the end of this month and you can expect Malaysia to be part of its list.
Apart from the hardware, the HTC Desire Eye that runs on the latest Android 4.4 KitKat and Sense UI will come with its HTC EYE experience. This is basically an upgraded software feature to boost its photography capability. This includes Auto Selfie, where it knows when to take a shot automatically so that you can just focus on framing the perfect shot. Also new is Split Capture that takes photos and videos using both front and rear cameras. There are other interesting camera tricks as well including one that lets you crop yourself using the front camera and then superimpose yourself in the scene taking with the rear camera. Video calls are made better too as the front camera is now enhanced with Face Tracking so that your face will always be in view even when you’re moving about.
The HTC EYE experience will also be rolled out to other HTC One series smartphones through Over The Air (OTA) software update. Another announcement is its HTC Zoe app which is now extended to both Android and iOS devices. This is basically a story telling app where it remixes your photos and videos into a shareable highlight video.