Review: Can a smartphone camera do it all?


SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? If you’re anything like me, your cellphone and its built-in camera is always on you, while your digital camera gathers dust at home.


But as smartphone makers have increasingly realized the potential of the built-in camera, there’s been a deluge of phones with cameras that can match ? and sometimes outperform ? low-end dedicated devices in a snap.


It has an 8-megapixel camera and plenty of the settings you’d find on a normal digital camera. The device takes crisp, bright photos and is simple to use. With it in hand, you’ll be missing some pocket camera features, but mostly you’ll be apologizing to your increasingly dusty digital friend.

The phone runs Google’s Android operating software and costs $200 with a two-year service contract.

Although you can easily find a cheap digital camera that can take higher-resolution photos than the myTouch, the phone has a lens that gathers more light, which makes for better shots in dim lighting. Indeed, I generally found the phone’s built-in flash too blinding and got better results by simply using the camera’s night setting.

It’s also very quick to take photos. On lots of cellphone cameras, there’s a lot of shutter lag, which refers to the irritating gap between when you press the shutter button and when the camera actually takes a photo. T-Mobile touts the myTouch’s camera as having “zero” shutter lag. The camera records continuously when the camera application is open and grabs the frame that corresponds with when you pressed the button.

Indeed, it was better than nearly all cellphone cameras I’ve tried, and it’s on par with Apple’s iPhone and the Pre, made by Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Palm division. But there did seem to be bit of a gap, especially when taking action shots.

The myTouch’s biggest issue, sadly, is the same one you encounter on virtually all cellphone cameras. There’s no optical zoom, which is where the camera lens moves closer to subjects. To conserve space and cut down on moving parts, cellphones generally include optical zoom’s dumb cousin, digital zoom. That’s a software trick that simply magnifies what the camera sees, without making images as sharp as they are with optical zoom.


That said, the myTouch’s camera is quite good for close-up shots. I took plenty of sharp, bright shots of my friends with the phone. And when using the camera’s macro, or close-up, setting, I was able to capture some great photos of textured objects such as a woven bicycle basket and brightly colored ones including flowers in a planter.

As is the case with standalone digital cameras, the myTouch’s camera includes facial recognition and smile-and-blink detection, as well as preset “scenes” for doing such things as taking portraits or action shots.


And if you’re into videos, it will record high-resolution clips, too.


I found the camera performed best in moderate and bright light ? a well-lit office or outside on a sunny day. On some of my canoe trip photos, colors looked somewhat washed out in very bright sunlight. Perhaps that could be fixed by tweaking the settings.

The phone includes an 8-gigabyte microSD memory card, which provides plenty of space for shots. There’s also 4 GB of memory on the phone.

In places where I had access to T-Mobile’s new high-speed 4G network, I could quickly upload photos to Flickr and Facebook, something I couldn’t do easily from a point-and-shoot camera.


In a day full of talking, checking and sending messages and taking photos, the phone’s battery held up nicely. It’s rated for up to 10 hours of talk time.

Probably the most glaring mistake overall is its slide-out keyboard, which was difficult to type on because the keys are not elevated enough. The phone doesn’t even really need a physical keyboard anyway, as it includes Swype’s excellent touch-screen keyboard software, which lets you slide your finger from letter to letter to type.

Here’s an idea: Perhaps the next version of the myTouch could swap the keyboard hardware for a lens with optical zoom. That would make the phone’s great camera even better and tempt me to leave my trusty digital camera behind for good.