HTC Desire Eye review: Undercover flagship

Android KitKat with Sense 6 UI

The HTC Desire Eye comes with Android 4.4.4 KitKat covered by Sense 6 UI. The built-in apps each have a different accent color which spills out onto the status bar, changing its color to create a uniform effect - similar to what we've seen with Apple's iOS 8. Sense 6 looks and feels just like on the HTC One (M8) and (E8.

Here's a brief rundown of Sense 6 UI on the HTC Desire Eye.

The lockscreen hasn't really changed much since Sense 5 - there's a clock with weather information and four app shortcuts. Swiping up takes you to the last app you used, while swiping to the left or to the right will take you to the homescreen or BlinkFeed, respectively.

The HTC Desire Eye offers Motion Launch features like on the HTC One (M8). You can unlock the device with a swipe on its screen or a double tap when the latter is off.

The lockscreen

Once you unlock you're greeted by a practically identical homescreen as before and virtual on screen buttons. Having the buttons on-screen ensures better response time and less chance of operational deterioration but also means you're effectively giving up part of your screen estate in order to accommodate them there.

The background behind the buttons is transparent and they obediently move out the way when you're watching a video or image so it's not that bad. But some apps still haven't been optimized to work with on-screen buttons and will stubbornly leave them there and shrink back the content to fit them, which isn't ideal.

HTC Sense 6 homescreen

The leftmost homescreen pane of the Desire Eye is reserved for HTC BlinkFeed. It aggregates content from your social networks, as well as from various news sources. You can pick what topics you're interested in and BlinkFeed will automatically pull fresh content for you. You can also search for specific content. You can turn BlinkFeed off if you prefer or choose to not have it be the default homescreen.

BlinkFeed

You get up to five homescreen panes to fill with shortcuts and widgets (the sixth is reserved for BlinkFeed). You can set any of the panes as default..

Adding widgets • editing homescreen panes

The notification area is business as usual - you get notifications in the right page and quick toggles in the left. You can access the quick toggles by a tap in the upper right corner or through a two finger swipe down from the status bar.

The notification area and quick settings

The app drawer is vertically scrolled unlike stock. Aside from the usual alphabetical and chronological order of apps you can also sort them in a way you see fit. The grid of apps can either be a 3 x 4 or the more sensible 4 x 5.

The app drawer

Getting to the recently-opened apps is done with the dedicated on-screen button. The interface shows a list of thumbnails for each app. You can swipe them away one by one as before or use the new close all option, thankfully.

You can also get to the task manager from the recent apps screen - it shows you the currently active apps and RAM usage.

Recent apps

Wallpapers, lockscreen style, ringtones, notification sounds and alarms can be customized via a dedicated menu. This time around, the lockscreen styles cannot be changed.

The personalization menu

The HTC Desire Eye also has a built-in restricted access Kids mode. It is an app that lets you set up a profile for each of your kids, with a photo and birthdate and pick which apps they can have access to.

Kids portal

Everything runs smoothly on the HTC Desire Eye and Sense 6 offers fluid animations that don't get in the way of the processor. But that's expected given the hardware on board.