HTC today announced a new phone with a 13-megapixel front camera, the HTC Desire Eye, and a small handheld camera called the HTC Re. In meetings with HTC, we got to spend some time with both of the smartphone company’s new picture-centric products.

In short, the HTC Desire Eye is a great-looking, large Android phone with a somewhat gimmicky but super-sharp front camera. The HTC Re is a somewhat overpriced experiment at creating a true impulse camera – not an action cam, not a life-logging cam, but a “I see this, so I’ll snap it” cam.

The HTC Desire Eye
The HTC Desire Eye isn’t made of metal, but it’s a premium-feeling plastic phone. At 6 by 2.9 by 0.32 inches and 5.4 ounces, it’s much longer than the iPhone 6 and noticeably wider than the HTC One M8 ($177.41 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) ; it’s a pretty big phone. Like Nokia, HTC is using a dense, well-cast plastic, not like the snap-together panels that Samsung uses. That means you can’t open up the Desire Eye or replace the battery, but there is a MicroSD card slot in the side to supplement the 16GB of storage. The 5.2-inch, 1080p IPS LCD screen is par for the course at this point. You can’t see the Boomsound speakers under the white plastic front, but they’re there.

On benchmarks, the Desire Eye’s 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor scored a little bit behind flagship Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 . It doesn’t measure up to the Apple iPhone 6, especially on graphics benchmarks. It’s definitely in the flagship realm, though. 

So it’s a good Android phone. The reason to buy this over a Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8 would be the cameras, so let’s talk about those. HTC warned me that the Desire Eye I was trying was pre-production and that image quality would improve.

The Desire Eye has a few new camera modes, although HTC isn’t going the full Samsung here. Split Capture is a good idea: it takes photos or videos with both cameras, side by side. I used that one a lot; it’s great for narrating videos, and so much less cutesy than Samsung and LG’s picture-in-picture modes.

Photo Booth is cute, taking a sequence of photos three seconds apart and stitching them into one image. “Crop-me-in” is a bizarre experiment at masking, where it tries to paste an image taken with the front camera into the background taken with the main camera.

Photos with both cameras tended to wash out unless HDR mode was turned on. HDR selfies were pretty gorgeous. Both cameras take 1080p video at 30 frames per second, but it gets soft and smeary in low light.

Putting a 13-megapixel camera on the front of your phone privileges sharpness over shutter speed. Indoors with big windows giving natural light, the front camera ran at 1/30 second, so someone moving behind me was blurry. In a darkened hallway, the camera really hustled to offer a passable image. With a shutter speed of 1/9, I got a noisy image with a lot of artifacts.

The Desire Eye will cost $199 with contract when it comes to AT&T later this month. It will arrive on T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless by the end of the year.

Continue Reading: Hands On With the HTC Re>

Hands On With The HTC Re

The HTC Re
The Re is made of smooth white, orange or blue plastic; the white model is the prettiest. It doesn’t have a power button. You pick it up, and it turns on automatically within about two seconds. With the Re gripped in your hand, your thumb rests right on the big silvery button: press once to take a shot, or hold it down to start a video. A little white button on the front kicks it into slow-motion video mode.

Let’s make this clear: this is not a GoPro. It is a GoAmateur. Yes, it has accessories and mounts that let you put it on a bike, but the real use here is more like life-logging: snapping photos of kids, street scenes, or anything else that catches your eye.

It’s really easy to take a lot of bad pictures with the Re, everywhere you go. There’s a learning curve when you’re using a handheld camera with no viewfinder; I found I had to stay conscious, at least for a little while, of where that big lens was pointing. Take some time to adapt, though, and it’s considerably quicker to use than a smartphone or a point-and-shoot. Pull the smooth little thing out of your pocket, hit the big silver button, and record your world. It’s addictive.

The problem is, it may not be $200 worth of addictive. The Re is convenient, but it lacks a bunch of things I’d assume from a $200 camera. There’s no framing; you have to assume that everything will just be captured in that huge, fish-eye field of view. Yes, I know that’s just the world of action cameras, but I’m not used to it. There’s no zoom, which makes the Re a lot less attractive for filming concerts and kids’ sports games. And the Re isn’t instantaneous; I found it took about a second to start up, and a second between shots.

Video recording had some audio issues. There’s a microphone on top of the Re, but it was very sensitive to wind noise. My outdoor video was just speckled with wind bluster. Dynamic range also isn’t terrific. Anything white in my video, taken on a bright but cloudy day, was really washed out. That could be changed in software, though.

Although the Re records onto a MicroSD card and has a MicroUSB port for charging and transfer, you need an Android phone or iPhone to manage the Re’s settings. The phone connects to the Re through Wi-Fi Direct. You can flip it between 1080p and 720p video, kick stills from 8.3 to 16 megapixels, use the phone as a remote viewfinder and set up a time-lapse mode. 

The Re will cost $199 when it comes to Best Buy and other major retailers around the end of October.

We’ll have full reviews of the Desire Eye and the Re when they hit shelves.