HTC Zoe Goes Out of Beta on Android; Coming to iOS Later This Year

HTC, apart from launching the new Desire Eye selfie-focused smartphone alongside the RE action camera, also announced that its native collaborative video editing app, HTC Zoe, is now out of beta. Additionally, the company announced the HTC Eye Experience, which is an "enhanced imaging software" for HTC devices.

The new Zoe (version 1.0) is now available for download from Google Play for Android, while an iOS app will be rolled out later this year. Initially announced in beta mode back in August for select non-HTC devices running Android 4.4 or above, the Zoe app is now available for a wider range of select Android devices running Android 4.3 or above.

Notably, the HTC Zoe app has been made by HTC Creative Labs, the team responsible for the company's Sense 6 UI, Blinkfeed app and other services.

HTC Zoe is an app that enables users to create a video and take images at the same time. Users can edit videos, add custom soundtracks and share it with friends in the Zoe community. Users can also access their friends' highlight videos, remix and share them.

Announcing the news, the company in a blog post said, "In August, we launched Zoe (beta). With Zoe 1.0, we bring flexibility to the community, enabling short, medium and long Zoes that can be made up of just a couple of still images, or an entire series of video clips, with its new content engine (coming later this year), making it easy to present small numbers of clips or even individual images in an interesting, visually stunning way."

The HTC Eye Experience, on the other hand, brings new mobile imaging software features released on the HTC Desire Eye to recent smartphones from the company. The new features will be rolled out to the following models in the coming months - HTC One (M7), HTC One (M8), HTC One (E8), HTC One mini, HTC One mini 2, HTC One Max, HTC Desire 816, HTC Desire 820 and HTC Butterfly 2.

Some of the notable features of the HTC Eye Experience include a new Split Capture function that allows simultaneous images or videos taken from the front and back cameras to be combined into one split-screen image or video; Crop-Me-In, which allows a user to crop an image or video taken with the front-facing camera and superimpose it within a scene captured by the main camera; Voice Selfie lets users click images from the front camera by just using voice commands; Face Fusion technology, which allows users to merge two faces into an image, and Live Makeup, an option to beautify selfies.