Hands-on: HTC Desire 826’s UltraPixel selfie cam makes it the poor man’s Desire EYE [VIDEO]
HTC this morning announced yet another Desire device, and this one focuses on the selfie experience nearly as much as the HTC Desire EYE does. It’s being called the HTC Desire 826, a mid-range phone that utilizes an UltraPixel camera sensor on the front of the device for enhanced selfie performance. Because selfies make the world go ’round, right?
That’s not the 13 megapixel LED flash-laden front shooter on the EYE, but still enough to make us happy. The rear shooter does have that 13 megapixel sensor, though, and beneath it rests a lone LED flash.
Under the hood, the Desire 826 sports Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615, a 64-bit octa-core SoC that uses a total of 8 Cortex-A53 cores — one set of four is clocked at 1.7GHz for intense performance, while another set of 4 come in at 1GHz. Graphics performance is handled by an Adreno 405 GPU. Other specs include 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and the ability to expand storage using a microSD card.
While the device may not be positioned as a premium option such as the HTC One M8, our hands-on time with it revealed a build that felt very solid. The most interesting aspect of the build is a grippy outer ring to make sure the phone doesn’t accidentally slip out of your hands. The rest of it is a nice-looking glossy hard plastic.
HTC has some funky things going on with the color, too, with the aforementioned outer ring and things like the ring around the camera being accented with alternate colors. You can see bits and pieces of that in the pink model we had our hands on above, though there should be a few more color options on the way.
The device, which is coming to market with Android 5.0 Lollipop, will be on its way later this month in select markets. Take a look at our early hands-on with the thing above.