HTC Desire Eye review

The HTC Sense interface has set the brand aside from other Android handsets for some time now and the company has worked continuously to improve it. The Desire Eye comes with Sense 6.0 overlayed onto Android 4.4 KitKat.

Although HTC has said it will be delivering Android 5.0 Lollipop to its flagship handsets within the next 90 days, there's been no mention of the Desire range.

Sense is anchored on the HTC BlinkFeed news aggregator app. You can disable it if you want but I've consistently found it to be a really useful feature. It exists as a homescreen all its own and delivers tiled news content based around your own curated interests. You can throw in Twitter, Facebook and other updates as well if you fancy.

It'll also sync nicely with your calendar, so you can see at a glance if you've got any important commitments each day.

Swiping away from BlinkFeed gives you the traditional homescreen app layout and the option to add widgets and group apps together into folders. There's still the app drawer, which you can get to by hitting the small grid icon between the four anchored apps.

Swiping down from any point gives you the notification panel and the option to quickly access the settings or dismiss the notifications altogether. It's a simple interface to get to know and anyone familiar with Android won't be put off by it.

But if you prefer the stock Android experience of the Nexus 5, then HTC's offering might be a touch overbearing for you.

Performance

There's a quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU inside the HTC Desire Eye, giving it more muscle than you might think for a mid-tier handset. Although the chip has been surpassed by the Snapdragon 805, many of 2014's flagship handsets, including the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2, shipped with the 801.

The speed is clocked at 2.27GHz and HTC has also matched the 2GB of RAM in its current flagship, the One M8. It means the Desire Eye has plenty of speed when running multiple apps and games.

I ran the Geekbench 3 benchmarking test and the Eye returned a 2713 multi-core score and a 954 single-core score. This puts it on a par with the likes of the Sony Xperia Z2 and the LG G3 which scored 2765 and 2561 on the multi-core test respectively.

In real world terms, the phone coped really well with demanding 3D games like Modern Combat 4 or Real Racing 3. It relies on an Adreno 330 GPU for gaming and other visualisations and in this case, having a larger screen really improves the experience.

There's not much that this phone won't be able to handle. I had all the connectivity switched on, multiple tabs opened in the browser and music playing and it still kept the speed up. The only thing to keep in mind is that with only 16GB of storage, you're apt to run out of space quickly.