HTC Desire EYE Review: More Than Just A Selfie Phone

I’m going to be completely honest here and admit that when HTC announced the Desire EYE I rolled my eyes dramatically. What, I thought, is the point of a phone so focused on taking selfies. I know that pictures of yourself are the in thing – a trend I really don’t understand – but are they so important that we need to give the same quality of imaging to them as we do the rear camera.
So when HTC handed me a Desire EYE to test at their Nexus 9 event the other day I was very, very keen to see what this phone had to offer beyond a gimmick aimed at getting traction for the company with the younger phone buyer.
The shocking truth of the Desire EYE is this – I like it. And I don’t just like it a little bit, I like this phone a lot.

Some caveats to my adoration
I want to be very clear and up-front here, there are things about HTC’s phones that have bothered me for a while, but I was never able to put my finger on. Well, I’ve worked it out. I just don’t like HTC Sense, which is the UI the company has built around the standard look of Android.
I worked this out after playing with the HTC Desire Eye for a bit, out of interest I switched the launcher over to the Google Now version. Google offers this free to any Android user that wants a more Nexus-like experience, and it replaces things like the app tray and homescreen layout. I also, for the first time ever, had a fiddle with the display fonts and removed HTC’s rather ugly typeface, and switched to Helvetica.

Some might say that, in so doing, I have removed what HTC is from the phone, and turned it into a more generic phone. I can see the argument there, but I so rarely used any of the HTC widgets and trinkets that it makes no difference to me. Plus, most of the functionality remains. You can still use Zoe, HTC’s camera app for example.
I could go further, and strip out HTC’s keyboard, but the truth is it’s actually rather good, and one of the better at dealing with mistakes and allowing you to go back and correct them. For example, I love the way I can go back to a corrected word, using the delete key, and it offers to restore the original word, as typed.


Plastic is cool  
The first thing that I really like about the Desire EYE is the case. Most people seem to lust after metal these days, but this is one of the nicest finishes I’ve seen on a smartphone. It’s something in between the cheaper plastic you find on mass-market phones, and the solid feel you get with a metal unibody. The big advantage is that the cost of plastic moulding is significantly less than aluminium construction.

The plastic finish is superb, and feels great – Photo: Ian Morris

What’s great about the finish is that it’s not smooth, it has a texture that feels better, and gives you more grip on the phone. Compare it to the Apple iPhone 5C for example, and it feels like a much higher quality device.

The screen
HTC isn’t trying to break any resolution records with the 1080×1920 resolution display. That said, it’s really crisp and clear and a joy to use. In many ways it makes more sense to have a 1080 screen on a phone of this size, it saves battery and a quad-HD panel would add very little. It’s pretty good in direct sunlight, it’s got good colour and overall brightness, and there are no noticeable bright spots.


Waterproof

One of the real benefits of the EYE is that it’s waterproof. It can handle being submerged in water for 30 minutes, at a depth of 1 meter. That’s really great, and means that you can use it in the rain with no problems, and if you drop it in the bath or sink, it won’t spell the end for the device.

There are no rubber stops to prevent water entering the phone – Photo: Ian Morris

What’s more, unlike Sony’s Z3, there are no rubber grommets to keep water out of the USB socket. This is great, because it means that if you forget the phone won’t be destroyed. This is easily one of the best features of the EYE.

Dual cameras
HTC’s selling point, and the reason this phone is called the Desire Eye, is that this phone has two 13-megapixel cameras. One on the front, for selfies, and one on the back for standard photography. This idea is somewhat odd, and while it does work well I really don’t understand what it offers most people. You would have to be photographing yourself five times per day to make it worth having such a high quality camera for selfies.

Front-facing 13-megapixel camera – photo: Ian Morris

Of course, there are some other reasons to have a high-resolution sensor. It allows you to crop to a single, or multiple faces, without too much quality loss. Even so, it still requires that you are taking selfies on an almost constant basis to be worthwhile.

Battery life
I say this every time I review a phone, but I am a battery killer. No one I speak to is able to chew through power like I can, so when I review a phone my figures for battery life are probably a worst case scenario.
On my most power intensive day, I was able to get through 49 per cent of the HTC EYE’s battery by 1pm. This was with exhaustive use of Google Play Music, Google Maps and with the screen on for a considerable part of the day as well as lots of camera use. I also had WhatsApp and Skype running for various messages. This is actually pretty impressive, and while it means that the phone wouldn’t make it through the whole day without a top-up, it performed well.

 

Also an advantage of the EYE is the Fastcharge 2.0, which comes as part of the Qualcomm chipset. This, it is claimed, can charge a 3300mAh battery – about 1000mAh more than the EYE has – to 60 per cent in 30 minutes. To use this feature you’ll need to buy a compatible charger though. Probably worthy of the investment, although it’s something of a disappointment that it doesn’t come with one in the box.

Performance
During an especially intense session of navigation with Google Maps and battling with Starbucks Wi-Fi, I did notice that the performance of the EYE can be a little slow at times. It’s not catastrophic by any means, but it feels slower than phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and LG G3. That’s not a massive surprise though, as those are high-end phones, and this is more of a mid to high-end device.

For most things though, there’s enough power here to keep you happy. I can’t help but wonder if there is an issue with Sense using up more than its fair share of RAM and processor power. Although I opted to use the Google Now launcher, Sense is still there in the background, and this might have had a performance impact. It would be very interesting to see how this phone performs with stock Android installed.

Camera quality and features
The HTC camera app is nice to use. I did notice that when I opened it via the Google Now launcher the video camera option was disabled. I have no idea why, buy launching the app via Sense or from the app tray didn’t suffer from this problem.
There are loads of filters, and the app itself is quite intuitive. For example, swiping down from the top allows you to switch from the front camera, to the back camera and then to a 50/50 split with both front and back cameras. That makes the whole process of taking photos pretty snappy.

The camera is one of HTC’s better models – image: Ian Morris

 

There are also dozens of filters you can apply. Their value is pretty limited for me, but those buying this phone are presumably doing so to get a flexible camera, and from that perspective it makes a lot of sense.
Quality is actually pretty good. As always, there’s some of the softness you usually get on cameraphones. It’s nothing to catastrophic, but looking at photos at 100 per cent does show some crushing of detail. But the two cameras do perform equally well, which is what HTC set out to achieve.
One slightly limiting thing I notice is that the video camera doesn’t have a massive amount of configurable shooting options, you can choose 720p or 1080p, but there isn’t, for example any slow-motion mode, nor can you select different frame rates. The maximum shooting mode is 1080/30p, which is good, but I’d like to see 60p now, in light of YouTube supporting it. I suspect the camera and chipset are capable, this is a software issue.

Conclusion
The price is pretty reasonable at $550. Personally, I think HTC could have released this phone without the 13-megapixel front camera and reduced that price by a bit and made it all the more attractive. Really, the “selfie” camera will appeal to a modest number of people. But with that said, that shouldn’t put you off the phone. It is still a great handset, built well and finished to perfection.



I have some minor quibbles about performance, but some of those might be because of Sense running alongside the Google Now launcher. They are only minor problems though, and overall I think the phone is a great performer.
I didn’t expect to like the HTC Desire EYE, but I really do and as a mid-range handset I’d say it beats a good proportion of the other phones on the market.