For celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and President Barack Obama and everyone in-between, selfies have become a part of our culture. With its new smartphone, HTC is banking on the popularity of selfies and apps like Snapchat to separate itself from the competition.

At its press event last week, HTC unveiled a new smartphone geared specifically toward snapping selfies called the Desire Eye.  The phone comes equipped with a 13 megapixel user-facing camera.

HTC has raised the bar and set a new standard for smartphone manufacturing going forward. In the selfie era, millennials arguably take just as many photos on a daily basis with the front-camera as with the back. Now that we know what is possible, it’s unacceptable for companies like Apple and Samsung to continue to produce phones with such poor quality front-cameras.

Compared to the Samsung Galaxy S5’s 2-megapixel and iPhone 6’s 1.2-megapixel front cameras, the HTC Desire Eye is by far the best user-facing camera we’ve ever seen on a phone. The Desire Eye’s front camera also comes with its own flash and a wide-angle lens to fit as many people in your selfies as possible, according to an Oct. 8 Yahoo article.

It won’t be long until other phone manufacturers steal the idea of equal quality cameras on both sides of the phone, but HTC should take pride in being ahead of the curve. Selfies are more than a fad and HTC should be congratulated for being the first manufacturer to capitalize on that. The company may not have the top selling smartphone, but the Desire Eye offers something unique to the mobile market and could force Snapchat-lovers to reconsider their loyalty.

Along with this new double exposure phone comes an entire imaging software suite they call the HTC Eye Experience, according to the article. The software includes a split-capture feature that allows you to capture photos and videos with both the front and back cameras into one image or video, putting yourself into the experience in front of you.

There is also a voice selfie feature that allows you to snap pictures just by saying “smile” or “say cheese” and a live makeup option which instantly smooths wrinkles on your face to quickly get your selfie Instagram-ready. This phone has the potential to become a girl’s best friend.

Instead of releasing a big-screen phone to compete with the iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy series, HTC wisely focused on making one aspect of the phone better than everyone else. Trying to pull customers away from Apple and Samsung has been unsuccessful in the past, but the Desire Eye finally offers something the other companies can’t.

You might be thinking that a quality front-facing camera won’t be enough to persuade consumers to buy a relatively unknown smartphone. But camera quality will continue to become more vital as more people join Snapchat, one of the fastest growing mobile apps on the market. And the selfie itself dominates our culture, heard in song lyrics like “But first, let me take a selfie,” an ABC TV show titled “Selfie” and the word “selfie” being added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Instead of following the trends of other companies, HTC is making the competition come to them. While Apple and Samsung copy ideas from each other, HTC’s research and development team is thinking outside the box. If Snapchat is your go-to app and your photo album is stocked with close-ups of yourself, then the HTC Desire Eye may be the phone for you.

The selfie game has officially been changed forever.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on October 16, 2014 at 12:01 am