It can’t get more desirable than this

A year ago, if we had to brag about running into a celeb, our friends would say “Tweet-pic it, or it didn’t happen.” However, if we had run into the same movie star today, our same friends would happen to say, “Selfie, or it didn’t happen.”

Because being in the right place at the right time is not the most important thing any longer – being in the frame at the right time and right place is.

We really don’t need to explain how big the selfie revolution is – some of the most important moments in our lives are now captured by our smartphones’ front-facing cameras. It’s so big that just about a few months ago, smartphones started venturing beyond the conventional front cameras with just a couple of megapixels to spare. And now we’re at a point where we have the HTC Desire Eye – a smartphone that carries a full-fledged camera, that’s as good as any rear-facing camera (if not better), along with the latter.

But is it just something to whet your sefie appetite, or anything more?

HTC always gets the design of its smartphones right, and the Desire Eye is no exception. Being the mid-range flagship from the manufacturer, it comes in a polycarbonate plastic shell, and not in a metal unibody like the One M8. But is the phone any less desirable in plastic cladding? We don’t think so – for starters, the Desire Eye has a very durable build. It even comes with dust and splash protection, something that even the M8 series doesn’t feature. Moreover, the body is coated with a soft-touch plastic that gives a solid grip, under all conditions, and the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protects the display from scratches.

At first, the Desire Eye’s design looks a lot like the iPhone 5c, but that goes away after the first 10 minutes of usage. Also, the big camera unit on the fascia also makes a great first impression. During the entire review process, the hardly inconspicuous front camera caught everyone’s attention.

Even before we got to read the full specs of the Desire Eye, we reckoned that it would require some serious processing power to manage the two cameras and make sure that the device isn’t just a glorified camera-phone. What we didn’t know that HTC would stuff the same specs as its own flagship the One M8. Hence, you get the heady mix of a 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor coupled with 2GB of RAM, to give you the same performance that’s seen on the One trio. Even the benchmarking remains the same.

The combination of these specs have clearly worked in HTC’s favour because the phone handles ever so brilliantly, and shows no strain even under the most loaded conditions.

The 5.2-inch display is quite brilliant too, as it is very bright even on the sunniest days, and the colour reproduction is breathtaking. It is quite obvious that HTC wanted the display to complement its imaging abilities.

Which brings us to the most important part of the phone – sorry, make that the two most important things.

But while the manufacturer keeps promoting the front camera, we’d like to begin with the rear one. While both cameras have similar resolutions of 13 megapixels and come with BSI sensors, they’re actually different if you dig deeper. The rear camera has an f2.0 aperture that captures absolutely incredible pictures in low-lit conditions, along with an expected stellar performance in properly-lit conditions, which makes us believe that this is probably the best smartphone camera in its segment. The autofocus is really fast for both the cameras, and there are a lot of in-camera tweaks that are available.

The front camera, on the other hand, has an f2.2 aperture, but the lens is wider at 22mm, giving you a bigger frame to cram in as many people as you can in your selfies. HTC has generously thrown in a dual-tone LED flash to make sure that taking a selfie in extremely dark frames wouldn’t make you look like a pale ghost. It gets the skin tone right, all the time. The video quality, on both the cameras, is top notch. There’s a physical button also thrown in to make life easier.

At this point, we have every reason to believe that the HTC Desire Eye offers the best package in its segment. It offers splendid performance, coupled with unbelievable imaging capabilities. Being an HTC, we would also recommend this phone for multimedia consumption, and of course, everything that the new Sense UI has to offer in terms of interactivity. The 2,400mAh batter is good enough to see you through a full work day, but we could have wished for a bigger battery, considering the fact that we just didn’t want to stop clicking pictures on this phone.

₹39,000

Love – Cameras; performance; multimedia

Hate – Battery could have been bigger