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; 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>