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For my money, there are really only two features that might make me want to upgrade my smartphone: the camera, and the battery life. The new HTC One (M8) is nailing it in the camera department.

The phone, announced on Tuesday, features a second camera sensor on the back that captures dimensional information about images. As a result, the photos you take can be refocused after the fact. HTC calls it Duo camera — and it is cool.

The manipulation is ultimately a digital trick, it’s not like the Lytro and its light-field technology. But the built-in UFocus editing tools apply artsy, shallow depth of field effects to any photo, making them look almost as if they were taken with a digital single-lens reflex camera. (Trivia note: The effect is called bokeh, which comes from a Japanese word meaning “blur” or “haze.”)

The HTC One has other built-in editing tools that take advantage of the refocusing, like Foregrounder, which automatically applies effects to everything but the image in the foreground. There are other editing tools that take advantage of the additional dimensional information, too, like seasonal leaf or snow-falling effects and a sort of 3-D effect that lets you tilt and pan an image for a mild hallucinogenic feeling.

The efficacy of these tools relies on your framing, of course, but UFocus can almost immediately take your Instagram snaps up a significant notch, and the end result, on the right photo, is startlingly good. It helps that the new HTC One has a very good camera over all: its UltraPixel technology produces images that are just four megapixels (a megapixel is one million pixels), but those pixels are larger than on bigger megapixel phone cameras, which produces better lower-light pictures and less image noise.

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What I really like, though, is that the editable images are shareable, according to HTC. If you send another One (M8) user one of these raw Duo image files, they’ll be able to edit as they like. And HTC representatives told me they planned to release an app that would let any Android edit the photos as well. They’ll also put out programming interfaces that let developers create more filters for dimensional images, although at the time of my briefing there was no time frame for the app or programming interface.

I’ve only spent a short time with the new HTC One, but I’m definitely enamored of the camera and of the simple and fun editing tools. Oh, and the new One also features a five-megapixel front-facing camera, which you know I’m going to like.

That said, some great features fall by the wayside with daily use, and some are buried or more complicated than they should be. We’ll see if the camera features are enough to propel the entire phone to success, especially with tough competition on the horizon. I’ll be comparing the new HTC One with the Samsung Galaxy S5 in a future column, so stay tuned for the complete reviews.

Twitter: @mollywood