HTC Desire Eye sports the best camera for selfies

Price: Rs 38,000

Selfie cameras in smartphones are gaining importance. While handset manufacturers are increasing the megapixel count on the front facing camera, HTC leads the race by adding a 13-MP camera on both the front and the back.

Design: The HTC Desire Eye is made up of soft plastic. It doesn't look as premium as the flagship HTC smartphones, yet it has a nice feel. To make it look different, HTC has made it a multi-coloured phone. My review unit had white front and back with a red rim running across all sides. There is a 5.2-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution at the front.

But what dominates the looks of this smartphone is the camera lens and dual LED flash above the display. There is HTC branding below the display. The three capacitive keys for home, back and multitasking are a part of the display. The rear is neat with the 13-MP camera with dual flash. The nano SIM tray and memory card slot are on the left edge, while the power key, volume buttons and the dedicated camera key are on the right edge.

Water and dust resistant: Not many smartphones today are water and dust resistant. Thankfully, the Desire Eye is. This smartphone is IP 57 certified, which makes it water and dust resistant. This means, it can be used when wet or you can carry it while rafting or near the beach. It is water resistant up to 1 metre and the maximum time limit for staying under water is 30 minutes.

Camera: Let's first talk about the selfie camera. The 13-MP front facing camera clearly stands out. It can be used in three different resolutions, large (4208 x 2368), medium (3154 x 1824) and small (2592 x 1472). The camera took some time to lock the focus before capturing the image. There are various settings to play around with for the front-facing camera. One can choose from various modes such as slow motion video, auto, night, HDR, portrait and backlight. The dual LED flash comes handy while capturing images at a pub or when outdoors at night. For using the front and the rear camera at the same time, HTC has added two options - crop-me-in and split capture. Here both the cameras get activated. With spilt capture, hold the phone in the landscape mode and capture a shot from each camera side-by-side. Crop-me-in only inserts a cut of the selfie image with the one captured from the rear camera. The 13-MP rear camera is a good performer.

Performance: HTC Desire Eye comes loaded with HTC Sense UI with Blinkfeed. It has got a 2.3-Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor with 2 GB of RAM. Of the 16 GB internal storage, only 12 GB is user accessible. Overall, the performance of this smartphone is pleasing. Everything works smoothly, including browsing web and downloading apps. It didn't slow even once while playing heavy graphic games.

Battery: The 2400 mAh battery struggled to last a day. I had to dim the brightness to make it run for a longer duration.

Bag it or Junk it: The best selfie camera with a good performance.

Plus: Dual 13-MP camera

Minus: Battery