We snap pix with T-Mobile's new 8-megapixel monster in our Samsung Memoir review. Does it match a point-and-shoot digital camera?
Review summary of the Samsung Memoir:
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 The Samsung Memoir is a problematic phone, mainly because of how it stacks up to its competition. It is undoubtedly the best cameraphone on the market, not just because it has the most densely packed sensor, but also because it took great pics under the best lighting conditions. But there were serious problems in the images, and poor low-light performance means we wouldn't recommend this phone over a simple point-and-shoot. Though it boasts the highest pixel count, this phone isn't much improved over the Samsung Behold, which costs about $100 less. So, you're paying $100 for 3-megapixels and bragging rights. While we liked the calling features and the great calling interface, we still had trouble with the phone's touchscreen, and we found the TouchWiz interface to be more cosmetic than useful. It's great to see that cameras on phones are being taken more seriously, but we think that Samsung, and other phone manufacturers, can produce a better high-megapixel phone than this one. Release: February 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Great calling features and interface. Best cameraphone on the market. Impressive navigation performance. Looks cool, like a slick little point-and-shoot camera.
Cons: Camera performance doesn't measure up to a cheap, 8-megapixel point-and-shoot camera. Low-light pics were horrible. Screen occasionally unresponsive, especially the keyboard. TouchWiz interface looks pretty, until you try to use it.
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Full Samsung Memoir Review:
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Design - Good
With the Samsung Memoir, Samsung has added to its growing family of TouchWiz phones on the U.S. market. Almost every carrier has one (no Sprint?), including T-Mobile, who were already selling the Samsung Behold, a nearly identical all-touch phone with similar specs, except for the 8-megapixel camera sensor on the Memoir, an upgrade from 5-megapixels on the Behold.
TouchWiz is a nice looking interface, with a scrolling bar of widget icons down the left side of the screen, and a useful menu bar on the bottom. Unfortunately, once we started using TouchWiz, we ran into trouble. We have had the same issues with every TouchWiz device. Widgets, while functional, don't fit well on the 3-inch screen, and they start to stack up on top of each other, making them hard to read and, worst of all, useless. The touchscreen has serious problems, as well. Often, the screen would make a selection we didn't want, or would fail to register a proper tap. Haptic feedback should have been helpful, but even when the phone vibrated to register a tap, in the onscreen keyboard, for instance, the phone would occasionally fail to produce the expected result.
Around back, the Samsung Memoir sets itself apart from the other TouchWiz phones. Like recent Sony Ericsson CyberShot models, such as the Sony Ericsson C903, the phone resembles a small point-and-shoot from the lens side. Samsung makes a classy-looking camera with an antique aesthetic, and though we wish the phone had the analog dials of the Samsung TL320 camera, it still looks nice, and we were pleasantly surprised to find an automatic lens cover than clicks open when the camera is active. The shutter button is well-placed on top where you would expect it to be, and the faux-leather finish on the side of the device made it easy to grip. Our fingers occasionally tapped the screen by accident, though, which caused some problems.
Calling – Very Good
Calls made on our Samsung Memoir review unit sounded very good. There was a slightly metallic quality to our voice on the caller's end of the line, but they got the short end of the stick because our side of the conversation sounded fine. We had some reception trouble. Our T-Mobile G1, on the same network, was getting 1-2 more bars of reception than this phone. For battery life, we managed a little more than 5 hours of calling time, which is actually pretty good for a large-screen phone on a 3G, HSDPA network. Still, we would worry about taking this phone out for a mixed day of heavy photography and calling. The viewfinder and Xenon flash can both be battery hogs. A larger, extended battery would be nice, and probably wouldn't offend the phone's already bulky aesthetic.
The contact list was surprisingly robust and well-organized, with plenty of fields and a nice design, divided into tabs. We wish that T-Mobile and Samsung had included some synchronization software, but we were surprised to find the phone automatically updates with T-Mobile's own servers and your MyT-Mobile account every time we updated the contact list. It was actually a bit disruptive, as we couldn't go back into our address book until the update was complete, but better safe than sorry, we suppose.
The speakerphone on the Samsung Memoir was okay, but it didn't seem as loud as the abusive speaker on the Samsung Behold. Thankfully, the Memoir does have the same great call handling. It was very easy to swap and join two other calls for a 3-way conversation. The entire calling interface is very slick and clever. Speaker-independent voice dialing from Nuance is built into the phone, and it even gets its own widget. As always, Nuance's software worked great in our tests.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung Memoir was a competent messaging phone, but we had some occasional trouble with the onscreen keyboard. Often during our tests, keys just wouldn't register a proper hit. We would press the key and see the letter grow under our finger, and we would feel the haptic feedback, but nothing would happen onscreen. This happened with a few of the various onscreen icons, but affected our typing most of all. Otherwise, the keyboard does come with some nice contextual shortcuts, like dedicated keys for both "www." and ".com" in the Web browser.
For Instant Messaging fans, the Samsung Memoir features support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. The messaging client wasn't too advanced, but we found it to be a nice visual improvement over the standard carrier fare. On the Samsung Memoir's large screen, the IM app had a polished, clean look, and worked well chatting, though there was a slight delay before our initial message went through. For e-mail, the phone comes with a simple app and plenty of preset e-mail clients. We set up our Gmail account and were pleased to find the phone reacted quickly to new messages. In fact, the Memoir consistently warned us about new Gmail messages even before the T-Mobile G1, which uses Gmail as its backbone for messaging.
Camera – Very Good
Here we get to the crux of our evaluation, and when it comes to looking at the highest-megapixel cameraphone on the market there's really only one question to answer. Can this phone replace a point-and-shoot. In short, no, but it really depends on the type of pictures you'll be taking. Under the best lighting conditions, the camera did a fine job, though there were still glaring problems. Pictures were definitely print worthy, which is a rarity on cameraphones, but even a mediocre 8-megapixel point-and-shoot camera will produce better results. If you're looking to pick up a cheap extra camera, as a sidearm for a more advanced DSLR, perhaps, this wouldn't be a bad choice. Or, if you're a real cameraphone nut who snaps loads of pics with your mobile device, this is definitely the best cameraphone on the market. It edges out the Motorola Zine ZN5, a 5-megapixel T-Mobile compatriot, but only barely, and both phones suffer under poor lighting conditions.
One Room Schoolhouse
This is a good, clear shot taken on a bright, sunny day. There is some evidence of oversharpening, especially in the bricks and the high branches, and there's more color noise than we'd like to see in the blue sky. Still, a noble effort.
Schoolhouse Front
The bright sky has destroyed this picture. Not only in the branches at the top, which have exploded with purple fringing to a degree we would never find acceptable in even a cheap point-and-shoot. Even the rich, red bricks are washed out and hazy looking here.
Macro Bricks
Great close-up work here. We wish we could have gotten even closer, as we were still a few inches from the subject, but the detail is excellent, especially in the focal center.
Antique Windows
Dog Indoors
The indoor dog shot is okay until we zoom into a full crop. The fur still has some fine detail, but as we work out way to the end of the picture, as it were, we start to see not only noise, but also some strange, cartoonish greens and pinks showing up incorrectly in the dogs haunches.
Dog Outdoors
Our dog doesn't like hydrants, at least not in that special dog way. The camera, on the other hand, did a nice job of exposing the freshly-painted bright red. This is actually an accurate representation – the hydrant really is that color.
Needles
Under natural sunlight, the Samsung Memoir completely overexposes the center of this evergreen bush. There's some nice depth of field here, but this would have been a much better shot if the camera hadn't blown the subject and lost all detail to bright light.
Sunny Self Portrait
A good enough self portrait. We're still disappointed with the lack of detail in our scraggly beard hairs and fuzzy, cashmere cap.
Vegetables
Peppers
Tangerines
Inside, our local Whole Foods market has dramatic lighting for the produce, and the Samsung Memoir just couldn't handle the effect. The carrots in the first shot and the yellow peppers in the second are overexposed and bright white. On the periphery of the peppers, the tomatoes are drab and brown looking, which is not how they were in person.
Night Portrait at 1600 ISO
Night Portrait with Flash
Without the flash, we cranked up the ISO sensitivity on the Samsung Memoir to the alleged 1600 level, and this shot is the best we could get. We were standing near a street lamp at the time, which makes this all the more confusing, as the sensor seems to have hardly picked us up at all. With the Xenon flash turned on, we're a bit pale, but the camera at least captured our deer-in-headlights stare. Still, that green jacket is actually light beige in person.
Tiny Scene in Light Tent
eBay Shot
Set to automatic white balance, this shot was rendered unacceptably yellow. Since we were using studio fluorescent lamps, we set the white balance to fluorescent, and instead got these pics, both of which are warm to the point of being nearly purple. The first shot was more of a problem, and we think the pink figurine might have screwed up the color even further.
The eBay shot, on the other hand, is among the best we've seen with a cameraphone. The Samsung Memoir captured a great level of detail, including plenty of scuffs and scratches that are difficult to see with the naked eye.
The Samsung Memoir has a panorama mode, but it failed in our tests. After a full day of shooting, none of our panorama images were present among the sample shots we took.
Photo Management – Mediocre
Though the Samsung Memoir boasts a nice selection of photo uploading and management options, in practice these were hardly worth bragging about since they were mostly confusing or they simply failed to work. The phone uses two separate photo viewers. One is accessible from the camera itself, and one you can reach from the main menus or widgets screen. This seemed redundant, and the two viewers shared some features and split some features between them.
We tried e-mailing pics and sending them to our personal Flickr page. Though the phone claims to be able to handle both these tasks, neither worked properly. Our pictures never arrived in our inbox, and never showed up on our Flickr photostream.
Multimedia - Good
The media player on the Samsung Memoir is solid, with a nice interface and a brief, though effective range of features. It was easy to control playback with our fingers, and the phone synchronized with our Windows Media Player library with no trouble, even importing our album artwork into tiny thumbnails. There are no dedicated hardware controls for music, but the music player gets its own widget, so you can see the title of your tunes and control the music from the home screen. In Mass Storage mode we also found the music transfer (and any USB data transfer) to be blazingly fast, clearly taking full advantage of a USB 2.0 connection.
The phone comes with a 1GB microSD card, and the slot can handle cards in excess of 8GB, which is nice, considering the good music player and the 8-megapixel camera. But if we're going to play music on this phone, we wish Samsung had included a 3.5mm headphone jack, or even an adapter. There is a set of stereo headphones in the box that will work with Samsung's outdated proprietary adapter, but we would always rather use our own cans. The phone also works with stereo Bluetooth, though, and worked fine with our wireless Bluetooth speakers.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Samsung Memoir uses a so-called full-HTML browser, but in practice it hardly matters if the browser can render full-HTML pages because most of our favorite sites would only recognize this phone as a mobile Web device. Then, the phone would render most pages in a single-column view. The worst part was that there were no settings for the Web browser for these issues. You can't change how the browser identifies itself, so CNN and the NYTimes homepage, not to mention Google's Reader and Facebook, all deliver their sub-par mobile content. This is too bad, and a waste of a so-called full-HTML browser.
Scrolling on the phone was not a smooth experience. Unlike on better touchscreen browsers, the pages on the Samsung Memoir's browser did not keep moving much after we flicked them up or down. Navigating through the long Web-page columns took a lot of flicking. There is a good-looking interface for the Web browser, but the app just isn't very capable, so the good menus don't help much. We wish there was a mini-map or some other fast navigation tool on board.
Navigation – Very Good
We're not sure what's different between the Samsung Memoir and the Samsung Behold, but we had a much better GPS experience on the Memoir than on the latter phone. TeleNav comes included with the device, and it found us very quickly. Admittedly, we were exploring Newark, New Jersey, and not the canyons of Manhattan, but we were still impressed by how quickly it found us and how accurately it tracked us. The phone had no trouble rerouting us when we missed a turn, and the fast networking helped load new maps quickly.
Price and availability
The Samsung Memoir is available now from T-Mobile for $300 with a contract agreement. A $50 mail-in rebate is available when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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