| I'll never forget the time I visited a Riverwalk restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, and ordered risotto. The dish is one of my favorites: rice that's been stirred in broth until it's rich, creamy and perfect. But what the waiter brought to the table wasn't risotto. It was just rice. A bowl of yellow rice. "Oh, I'm sorry," I said to the waiter. "I actually ordered the risotto?" The guy looked at me like I was the village idiot. "What do you think risotto means? It means 'rice' in Italian. That's what you got." I thought of that "risotto" last week when T-Mobile released the Samsung Memoir, the first 8-megapixel cameraphone in the United States. It costs $250 with two-year contract, after $50 rebate. See, high-tech companies play that same name game all the time. They get you all excited about some pocket camera by saying that it takes "high-definition" videos -- but even though the video has the qualifying number of pixels, it looks awful. Or they'll get you fired up because their new cell phone has a "touch screen" -- but it turns out to be stiff, balky and not worth it. So when Samsung says that the Memoir takes 8-megapixel photos, your first question should be: "So?" If the sensor, lens and circuitry are standard mobile phone junk, having a lot of megapixels won't do anything to improve the picture quality. Fortunately, the pictures from this phone really are very good, at least for a phone. Unfortunately, the remainder of the Memoir is only mediocre. The concept of a phone camera -- as opposed to a camera phone -- isn't new. Whereas a camera phone is a mobile phone with a tacked-on cheapo camera, a phone camera, like the Memoir, is designed to give equal weight to the camera part. Like the excellent Motorola/Kodak Motozine ZN5, also from T-Mobile, the Memoir looks like a cell phone on one side and a digital camera on the other. When you hold the thing horizontally, you find a shutter button under your right index finger, and zoom in/out buttons (which double as the volume keys) under your left index finger. There's a real flash -- a xenon flash, brighter than LED but not as bright as a real camera's flash -- and a true autofocus mechanism. On the big, bright touch screen, you can tap icons to access an array of camera controls, many gimmicky and ineffectual: white balance, exposure adjustment, scene modes, ISO (light sensitivity), anti-shake and so on. There's even Smile Shot, where the camera waits to take a picture until the subject is smiling (it works), and Blink Shot, where the camera doesn't shoot if the subject's eyes are closed (it doesn't really work). |