Today, HTC unveiled the Desire Eye, a successor to its lower-end Desire smartphone. The device is tailored to consumers who want to use their phones as an everyday camera, but don’t necessarily want to pay for the company’s One flagship handset.
The Desire Eye’s unibody plastic chassis surrounds a 5.2 inch screen, along with the company’s signature BoomSound speakers. The phone sports 13 megapixel image sensors in both the front and rear camera, which feature wide angle lenses and two-tone flashes. It’s a very similar approach to Microsoft’s new Lumia 730 and 735 “selfie phones,” which the company unveiled earlier this year.
Included with the new handset is HTC’s new “Eye Experience” suite of camera software. It includes an “auto-selfie” feature that makes it possible for users to grab a photo of themselves by holding the camera still for a couple seconds and letting the shutter automatically fire, so they don’t have to worry about triggering it manually. Users can also fire off the camera with voice commands like “say cheese” to snap a still, and “action” to start a video rolling.
The Eye Experience also includes a split capture mode that lets people grab photos from both a phone’s front- and rear-facing cameras.
For users of video chat software, the Eye Experience includes a new face tracking feature that determines where a user is in an image, and keeps their face in focus and in frame even as they move around. HTC device users will also be able to share the screen from their mobile devices through video chats as well.
Owners of an existing HTC One will get the Eye Experience software through an update rolling out within the next month.
The new focus on images is a move by the company, which has an engineering office in Seattle, to try and recapture consumer interest in its products. Despite positive reviews of its devices, the company has continued to bleed market share to other phone manufacturers like Samsung. Right now, HTC controls 4.5 percent of the total smartphone market share in the U.S., compared to Samsung’s 28.9 percent share.
