Casio's first serious cameraphone brings 3x optical zoom and a hardy design to Verizon Wireless. Do its pictures speak a thousand words? Find out in our Casio Exilim C721 review.
Review summary of the Casio Exilim C721:
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 There are very few waterproof phones on the market right now, so if you're looking for the one that takes the best pictures, stop searching and buy the Casio Exilim C721. We've seen better cameraphones, but none this sturdy, and certainly none that were waterproof. We wish Casio had done a better job with the camera interface, which was sluggish and difficult to use, but we still managed to squeeze out some great shots. Getting those shots onto our PCs was a big pain, and this needs an immediate fix before Mac users can apply. Beyond the durability and the 5-megapixel, 3X zoom camera, there isn't much to recommend on this phone. Messaging was barely adequate. For music and multimedia, the Casio Exilim C721 got the job done, but not very well. GPS navigation worked nicely, thanks to the VZ Navigator app on board. For most buyers considering the Exilim C721, though, these features won't matter as much as the military spec housing and the high-end camera. For those folks, there's nothing else on the market worth considering. Release: June 2009. Price: $280.
Pros: Very rugged and waterproof. Takes great pics under the best conditions. First optical zoom we've seen on a phone.
Cons: Cheap, plastic feel. Middling call quality. Mediocre messaging options. Simple WAP Web browser.
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Full Casio Exilim C721 Review:
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Design – Good
We have a lot of respect for a phone that is as rugged and durable as the Verizon Wireless Casio Exilim C721. The phone achieves military grade specifications for immersion in water, salt-fog, shock and vibrations, solar radiation, and low and high temperature storage. In other words, you can beat the hell out of it and it will still work. We can attest that this is true. We dunked the phone in water, and rubber gaskets sealed all the ports and covers closed. We dropped it onto rocks and down stairs and all we had to show for our trouble were a bunch of scratches on the shell. Nothing major. There are few phones on the market that can take this kind of abuse, and Verizon Wireless sells most of them. In fact, Casio also makes the G'zOne Boulder, a phone we enjoyed beating on last summer.
So, with its rugged shell in mind, its unfortunate that the Casio Exilim C721 is such an ugly, poorly designed phone. The cheap feeling plastic shell picks up dings and scratches even when you're not dropping it from a moving car. The numeric keypad buttons were okay, but the other buttons on the phone were either redundant or confusing to use. There's a shortcut for the camera, but the camera starts automatically when you reverse the screen and close the phone with the display facing out. We wish there were more useful shortcuts instead, like for voice dialing or messaging.
The phone interface uses a slick theme unique to this device, but it's basically freshly painted icons and wallpapers on the same old Verizon Wireless layout. The main menu seems confused about what's important, so features that we'd almost never use with this phone, like Gaming and V Cast Videos, are up top, while useful features, like Verizon Wireless' Web dashboard and the Photo Gallery, are buried deep within.
The phone's 2.3-inch screen looked good, certainly sharp enough for the dark menus that open by default. As a camera viewfinder, it was just okay. Onscreen menus and text was blocky and tough to read in the camera interface, even though we had no problem while messaging and browsing the mobile Web.
The camera interface was abysmal. There are no controls around the screen itself, like you'd expect to find on a compact digital camera. Instead, you have to control the phone using a series of buttons on the side, which is the top in camera mode. We found navigating the camera menus and picking our options to be sluggish and confusing. We'd also like to see a shutter button that was easier to depress, but this is probably a durability issue.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Casio Exilim C721 sounded fine for such a rugged device, but if you're planning on staying on the line all day long, you'll want a phone with more clarity. We heard a constant digital buzzing sound on our end of calls. Our callers reported a muffled quality to our voices. Reception on the phone was good. Using Verizon Wireless' network in the Dallas metro area, we got a solid 4 bars of service, only occasionally dipping by a bar from time to time. Battery life wasn't so hot. The phone managed 4.5 hours of talking time, but the battery was so small that we had trouble when we started mixing up our usage. With heavy camera use, the phone died quickly, and we never made it through a full day of shooting with some mixed in. Casio should have packed in a battery at least 50% larger than this one.
For calling features, the Casio Exilim C721 gets a nice mix. The address book is as simple as can be, with no synchronization options, which is a pity. Beyond contacts, though, the Exilim C721 packed all our favorite features. The phone uses speaker-independent voice dialing from Nuance, which is our favorite voice dialing software. The Exilim managed to guess correctly every time we used the voice dialing app. We had no trouble connecting a conference call, either, though you shouldn't expect any advanced control or calling screens to offer help or useful information during calls. The speakerphone on the Casio Exilim C721 was nice and loud, and the phone paired with our Bluetooth headsets without trouble.
Messaging - Mediocre
The messaging apps on the Casio Exilim C721 were a disappointment across the board. Even the simple SMS feature wasn't quite smart enough for our tastes, and didn't include such conveniences as capitalizing a letter after a period. We did like typing on the wide, roomy keypad, and the keys were nicely raised so typos were infrequent. Still, the IM app was an aging client with support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and the e-mail app was actually a WAP-based service that works through the mobile Web browser. It was clunky and very slow, and the service only included e-mail support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Verizon's own e-mail. This phone isn't meant for messaging, but with such an easy keypad, it would have been a nice extra had Casio and Verizon Wireless gotten this feature right.
Camera - Good
Casio has been selling cameras under the Exilim brand for some time, so as the first cameraphone Casio has released on the U.S. market, we wanted to have high expectations. In many ways, the Casio Exilim C721 is unique as a cameraphone. Besides its durability, it's also the first cameraphone we've seen with an optical zoom, up to 3X. Unfortunately, Casio doesn't let you turn off digital zoom, so it was too easy to skip past the real optical zoom and into the fake digital, which is really just a zoomed and cropped image. In fact, as we said earlier, the controls on the Casio Exilim C721 gave us a lot of grief. This phone is not nearly as easy to use as a real point-and-shoot camera, and the interface was both confusing and sluggish.
Image quality on the Casio Exilim C721 could be excellent under the best conditions, but as light levels grew challenging or dim, the camera had trouble keeping images clean and clear. Outdoors, under good sunlight, we took some very nice pics that were clean, nicely detailed and accurately colored. The camera displayed a wide, dynamic range. With its zoom lens, the Casio Exilim C721 is capable of some nice perspective shots, and presents a pleasing level of bokeh, which is the stylistic blur in the background of an image. On the down side, we saw heavy barrel distortion, where an image seems to curve and bend around the middle. Noise was a serious problem under low light conditions, but other problems that usually pop up, like fringing and other aberrations, were mostly kept under control. The best images we took with the Casio Exilim C721 were worthy of being printed and hung, so for outdoor types looking for a rugged all-in-one unit, the Casio Exilim phone is a great choice, if not the only choice.
In low light situations, the camera fell flat. The dual-LED flash didn't help much, it gave our subjects a pallid, ghastly look. Spots of color noise and splotchy details dominated the scene as the sun went down, and the camera had a very hard time dealing with a strong light source, like a backlight sun or fluorescent lights in the supermarket.
In the end, the Casio Exilim C721 was not the best cameraphone we've seen, but considering its durability, we were very impressed with the best images we managed to squeeze out of the 5-megapixel camera. The C721 wasn't as good as the Motorola Zine ZN5, a Kodak-branded camera, and it couldn't hold a candle to the best smartphone cameras on the market, like the Nokia N85 and the HTC Touch Diamond 2. So, we're still waiting for a cameraphone from Casio that focuses on image quality, perhaps with some of the high-speed features we've enjoyed on their recent cameras (to check out recent high-speed Casio cameras, click here). Of course, compared to other rugged, waterproof phones, the Casio Exilim C721 is easily the best of the bunch, as the only rugged phone that truly takes imaging seriously. Check out our sample images below to see the best of what we shot in our test period.
Bunch of Wildflowers
Flower close up
Flower and Insects
Self portrait with flash
Self portrait outdoors
Water Tower
Water Tower at 3X zoom
Field and Clouds
Flowers and Wood
Stone Fruits
Vegetables
Sunset
Managing our photos was a different story, and the Casio Exilim C721 made it very difficult for us to actually see our pics on our laptop. There is no USB port on the phone, so to connect to a PC you must use the included cradle. The cradle plugs into the USB port on your PC, and the phone will also charge while it's docked. But the Casio Exilim C721 doesn't show up as a mass storage device. Instead, you have to load the included Windows software, a confusing, messy program that pulled pictures off the phone. We switch between our Windows and our Mac machines, but Mac users will be totally out of luck. The phone does not save images as straight .jpg files on the microSD card. Instead, files are hidden in a database, and the only way to retrieve them is through the Windows software. This is a horrible solution, and one of the worst ideas we've seen for file management on a camera (or a phone, for that matter). We want to be able to pop out the microSD and read images directly off the card.
Multimedia - Good
The multimedia features are really a bonus on the Casio Exilim C721, and with low expectations, we were actually satisfied by what we found. The phone uses Verizon's V Cast Music for an over-the-air music store and as a music player. It's a bit heavy-handed on the interface, with too much flash and not enough substance, but it did a fine job playing the tracks we downloaded. For music from our PCs, you'll have to find the right folder for sideloading, but once you have it figured out, the player can do a fine job. Again, it's too bad there were no controls around the screen. We would have liked to flip this phone screen side out and play it as a straight portable media player, but it was almost impossible to control the music with the screen flipped around.
GPS – Very Good
The Casio Exilim C721 uses VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn navigation, and the phone did a very nice job handling the GPS mapping. The C721 found our position quickly and loaded maps in a hurry. It followed us through our turns and was able to reroute in time when we found ourselves off track. We liked using the navigation app with the screen turned around, which was more convenient to hold while walking or driving. VZ Navigator even used spoken input, so we could ask the phone to find a local ATM or gas station simply by talking to it.
Price and availability
The Casio Exilim C721 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $280 with a contract agreement.
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