HTC Desire Eye review

The Desire Eye is one of HTC's most unusual smartphones to date. With a 13-megapixel camera and dual LED flash on both the front and back of the handset, it's primed and ready for both photography and selfie fans alike, while its quick internals give it as much speed and processing power as the flagship HTC One m8. It's also incredibly well-made, with a bright, dual-colour unibody design and IPX7 waterproofing down to one metre, so you never need to worry about it breaking during a heavy rain shower or dropping it down the loo.

We particularly like how there are hardly any breaks in the chassis, as HTC has injected the Desire Eye's respective colours straight into its soft-touch surround. This allows for a near-seamless finish all the way round, while the slim 8.5mm profile and rounded corners are extremely comfortable to hold. We actually greatly prefer it to the One m8, as the extra dash of colour not only adds a bit of extra flare and personality to the handset, but the soft-touch rear also provides plenty of grip.

DUAL CAMERAS

If you really want to take your selfie photography to the next level, the HTC Desire Eye is the phone to buy. With 13-megapixel cameras on both the front and back of the handset and plenty of picture modes to choose from, the Desire Eye puts other so-called selfie phones such as the Nokia Lumia 735 to shame, providing much more detailed front-facing photos than any other smartphone we've tested. 

The front camera had a tendency to over-expose bright sources of light, such as overhead office lights, but on the whole we were impressed with the level of detail on show and its accurate colour reproduction. If you'd rather not reach for the dedicated shutter button, you can also set the phone to take selfies automatically or by using your voice, which it will do instantly as soon as it senses a face in its viewfinder.

However, despite having a wider 22mm lens than the rear camera's 28mm lens, we found the front camera had trouble focusing correctly if we held it too close to our face. The Split Capture mode, which uses both cameras at the same time, regularly captures more detailed and crisp images with the rear sensor than the front when held at a normal, relaxed arm’s distance away.

^ You too can take simultaneous double selfies with the HTC Desire Eye

This may be due to the live 'beauty' slider that smoothes out unwanted blemishes, but even turning this off still produced slightly soft-looking portraits. Fortunately, we did manage to improve the sharpness of our photos by holding the camera slightly further away from us, but it's a shame you have to stretch your arm out to get a well-defined picture.

The rear-camera was much better. In sunny weather, our photos were lovely and bright, and there was plenty of detail on show with hardly any noise whatsoever. It struggled to expose the sky correctly in more overcast conditions, but we still managed to get rich, vivid-looking shots once we'd tapped the right focus point onscreen. Enabling HDR mode also helped.

We were pleased with how it handled indoor photography as well. It managed to pick up all the different textures in our still life arrangement and the amount of contrast on show was excellent, showing lighter and darker parts of the photo hardly any obvious patches of noise.

DISPLAY

The Desire Eye has a reasonably large footprint, measuring 151.7mm high and 73.8mm wide, but it's still smaller than an iPhone 6 Plus. Its large 5.2in, 1,920x1,080 resolution display provides an excellent viewfinder for its two cameras.

Screen quality isn't quite as good as the One m8, but our colour calibrator showed it was still covering a respectable 90.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. Contrast was good, too, measuring 1,309:1 on its maximum brightness settings. This meant there was plenty of detail on show in our high contrast test images and we could see the screen clearly no matter which angle we were viewing it from. 

The screen was much brighter than the One m8 as well, measuring 563.59cd/m2 compared to the m8's 491.75cd/m2. This makes it much easier to see the screen in bright sunlight, for instance, which is particularly useful when you're trying to take photos with the sun behind you. Black levels were a tad high, though, measuring 0.43cd/m2, which meant blacks often appeared quite grey compared to the phone's dark bezels, and we found that text on desktop websites often wasn't deep enough to read clearly at the phone's native 1,920x1,080 resolution without zooming in. 

PERFORMANCE

Luckily, the Desire Eye's quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor is more than capable of keeping up with your web browsing habits regardless of whether you're zoomed in or not, as we saw no signs of judder when browsing through image-heavy sites such as The Guardian's home page and BBC News when panning round at close range.

Likewise, the Desire Eye's score of 562ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks was also roughly 100ms faster than several other flagship smartphones, including the One m8 and LG G3, and more than 300ms faster than the Sony Xperia Z3 and Motorola's 2^nd Generation Moto X, making it more than a worthy rival to almost every top of the range handset we've seen this year. Only the Samsung's Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy K Zoom have produced faster scores.

The Desire Eye's gaming capabilities were equally impressive. It maxed out both our 3DMark Ice Storm and Ice Storm Extreme tests and produced a silky smooth 17,520 or (71.1fps) in Ice Storm Unlimited. We also achieved an average of 55.3fps in Epic Citadel on Ultra High quality settings, so even demanding games shouldn't pose a problem.  

BATTERY

You needn't worry about the battery running out half way through the day, as the Desire Eye's 2,400mAh battery lasted 13 hours and 45 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This is roughly fifteen minutes longer than the One m8, so you should definitely be able to get through the day on a single charge before having to return it to the mains.  

CONCLUSION

There's a lot to like about the Desire Eye, and we think it might just be HTC's best smartphone yet. Its front-facing camera could be a little better, but we'd definitely choose this over HTC's One m8. The Desire Eye also has price on its side, as contracts are currently available for £27 per month on Three for 1GB of data, 600 minutes and unlimited texts, putting its overall cost roughly on par with the smaller Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. The Z3 Compact has a few more attractive features by comparison, including its superior 20-hour battery life and 20-megapixel camera, but if you're after a large screen phone with top of the range performance at a competitive price and two very good cameras, the HTC Desire Eye is the phone to buy. It comes recommended.