Switched

What We Like:

Shooting with the Memoir in camera mode feels like a using a regular point-and-shoot; you've got flash, brightness, ISO, timer, and playback options a touch away, and the camera interface is extremely responsive. Framing, shoting, and reviewing photos on the big screen is a big improvement over doing the same on the tiny screens of most flip phones. Multiple camera modes include continuous shooting, smile awareness, panorama mode (it automatically stitches several pictures together), and several effects, like black and white, sepia, and negative. Check out some of our shots below (images were simply resized, no other post-processing was done):



Image color is rich, and when you're working with 8 megapixels, you've got room to crop, a rarity when working with pictures from most cameraphones. Although the Memoir comes with a 16x digital zoom (no optical), we recommend doing your digital cropping and zooming on your computer, or you can upload straight from your phone to photo services like flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Photobucket. The camera does a fair job on auto-focusing; you'll see some of our shots aren't perfectly sharp. The Memoir also shoots video at resolutions up to 720x480 resolution.

What We Don't:

As much as we like the camera, the phone itself has some issues. On bootup, you'll be greeted with several widgets on the phone's home screen, reminiscent of OS X's Widgets or Vista's Gadgets. While it's cool to drag them around, we found they usually resulted in clutter, because there just isn't enough screen real estate to use more than four widgets at the same time. More importantly, the clutter makes it tough to quickly do what you want, whether it's texting a friend or accessing an e-mail.

The Memoir offers two ways to enter text. First, the touch-screen can mimic a traditional numeric keypad, and you can use the standard T9 predictive text to type messages. The phone's built-in accelerometer detects when the body is horizontal, and if you're entering text, an odd QWERTY keyboard pops up. See how the 'A' key on your computer keyboard is below and slightly to the right of the 'Q?' The Memoir's keyboard moves the 'A' key even more to the right, which throws off the spacing of rest of the middle keyboard row, resulting in countless spelling mistakes. Similarly frustrating, the '?' key is placed next to the space bar, and you can imagine what happens. We're sure our typing speed and accuracy would improve after using the phone for a few weeks, but these two keyboard problems are consistently frustrating.

As for the camera itself, you probably won't have much luck taking photos in low-light situations without the flash turned on, as is the case with most cameraphones. Photo reviewing doesn't offer the finger-flinging fun of browsing on an iPhone or G1; a careful press and slide left usually jumped us three or four pictures past where we'd planned. Similarly, the touch-interface, which subtly vibrates the entire phone whenever you press a menu, could be more accurate. We ran into trouble with accidentally pressing menus when in camera mode, because there isn't a place to rest your thumb on the body of the camera.

Unlike the G1 (also on T-Mobile), the Memoir doesn't have Wi-Fi, so Web browsing maxes out at 3G speeds.

Bottom Line:

Although the phone will play most music and video formats making it perfectly adequate for fans of portable entertainment, the awkward QWERTY keyboard and less-than-snappy menu system makes this a tough buy for heavy texters and mobile e-mailers. Even most Nokia phones can be loaded with a variety of appetizing and useful apps.

Still, this is one of the best cameras we've seen on a cell phone, and Samsung did an excellent job creating an easy-to-use camera interface that almost makes you forget you're snapping with a cell phone. When comparing apps and touchscreens, it's tough for the $249.99 Memoir to compete with the iPhone or the G1. That said, if you like having a decent camera around and want to trim down all the gadgets you're lugging about without having to drop the big bucks on something like Nokia's N85 (5 megapixel with Carl Zeiss lens) or Sony Ericsson C905 (8 megapixel), the Memoir may be for you.

Price:

The Memoir goes on sale today, February 25th, for $249.99 (after $50 rebate), and you'll have to sign up for a two-year service agreement and data plan.