Excellent in so many ways: HTC’s One reviewed

Then there’s another camera mode that is a little different. It’s called HTC Zoe, and while the name is a little silly, the concept is that you’re essentially shooting tiny videos and twenty images at the same time, with quick edits possible to produce different photos.

For instance, let’s say you want to take a photo of friends, but you don’t think that everyone will smile. Simply take a photo using Zoe by touching the camera mode on the left side of the shooting screen and you’ll record a three second video and 20 photos, with some nifty options for retouching afterward.

If you were right and not everyone smiled when you pressed the shutter, you’ll be able to go into the retouch mode of HTC Zoe to play with “Always Smile,” a setting that detects faces and loads in several frames for each of those faces, allowing you to select each one and alter the picture to make everyone smile.

Or if there was someone in the background that you didn’t want there, like someone who walked into frame. You can remove them using the “Object Removal” mode, which picks up on moving elements and allows you to get rid of them, replacing them with a different frame.

After editing in any of these options, and there are a few more we haven’t touched on, you can export an image by clicking save, which will save a frame, usually combining one of the 20 images and exporting a new four megapixel image.

It’s a neat function, because you can do some cool processing inside the phone, though not everything will be detected by the object removal system, and likewise the face editing features don’t always work the way you expect them to.

There is also the issue of whether or not anyone will use these features.

On the one hand, it sounds like a cool idea to be able to change people and their positions in order to make a perfect photo, but we’d hazard a guess that most people will just take the photo and want to upload it to their desire social network, omitting any real reason to edit the images, or just cropping to get the desired shot.

Outside of HTC’s demo content, which was on our review handset, we struggled to find ways to make the HTC Zoe retouch modes look as excellent as the images we had been supplied.

There is one side of HTC’s new imaging system that we really like, though.

It doesn’t have a name, but it does have a cool function, and that is, after you’ve taken some photos and videos, it will bundle everything randomly into a neat video to share with your friends. You can change the order of these by selecting shuffle, and even change the look the video has with one of six presets, but this feature makes it very easy to share a night or a weekend with people in thirty seconds.

There are some bugs, and we found it only works when browsing photos using the “events” dropdown, and not by album or folder, but when it does appear, it is still very cool.