Samsung’s Memoir: 8-Mpixel cameraphone with very strong competition
By Gareth Powell
The Memoir from Samsung is a cameraphone. (Which is a new word to mean a camera which is also a cell phone or, if you would prefer, a cell phone which is also a camera.)
The public relations people say it is the very first one. Which gives one pause. When you review equipment you sometimes wonder whether you reviewed it before. Review deja vu.
Going back carefully we find on Jan. 14, we reviewed the Sony Cybershot DSC-G3 which has WiFi which will upload images on the fly. But, more than that, it is a 10 megapixel cameraphone.
Which suggests that someone is telling little porkies or is going to duck around some PR phrase such as ‘widely available in the United States.’ Or whatever.
Take it that the Memoir from Samsung is a cameraphone and a find piece of work but if it is the very first one some PR people may have been sleeping through lunch.
Looking for a weasel phrase to let them off the hook it might just be: ‘Samsung and T-Mobile announced the Memoir, the first 8-megapixel cameraphone available through a US wireless carrier.’
The idea is essentially the same. You take a good — and it is good — Samsung digital camera and you stitch it on to a mobile phone.
So on the one side The Memoir (which has also been given the romantically exciting name of the SGH-T929) looks like a Samsung Behold cell phone. A big touch screen with an excellent interface which some one in marketing has not called Gubbins but, rather, TouchWiz interface.
It also has a virtual keyboard you get used to. On the other side, there’s the lens of an autofocus 8-megapixel camera with a bright Xenon flash.
Samsung says the camera has 16x digital zoom —not optical zoom — which means that, in effect, it has no zoom at all. Digital zoom merely duplicates, and that not well, what you can do with editing software.
The camera will also record in video recording. The 3G phone can automatically upload photos to Web-based services like Flickr and Photobucket.
Then there is a stack of gubbins like stereo Bluetooth, a speakerphone, voice dialing, assisted GPS, a Web browser, IM, and e-mail capabilities.
No price was released but it is a fair bet that it will be over $400 — ignore contracts for the purposes of pricing — which means its possibly going to be less expensive that its opposition; but not that much more inexpensive.
There is no spec sheet released as this is written but it’s probably to be more expensive than the 5-megapixel Behold, which costs $399.99 (we ignore contracts for the purpose of pricing) which makes the Sony Cybershot, which has a 4X optical (that is real as opposed to marketing gubbins) zoom Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens look very desirable. ‘
It may, or may not, cost a little more. But it has two megapixels more and a Carl Zeiss lens with a real zoom which takes some beating.
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