Convenience Trumps Fidelity: A Samsung Galaxy Camera Review

At the risk of sounding overly defensive, there's really nothing weird about the Samsung Galaxy Camera. We've been crossing phones with cameras for well over a decade, and the ability to instantly share photos as you take them is practically a necessity on modern smartphones. And yet the first time you whip  the Galaxy Camera out in public you get strange looks when people realize that you're not taking a picture, but checking your email.

It's probably the form factor -- the Galaxy Camera looks more like a large point-and-shoot than a phone, so having all those mobile-related bits mixed in can be a trifle disconcerting. What's strange is that internally, this is actually an immensely capable phone. It's running Android Jelly Bean, has a quad-core Exynos processor, a gig of RAM and 8gb of storage, a microSD card slot, wifi, bluetooth, 3G/HSDPA and (in some markets) even LTE. If those specs sound familiar, it's because they're almost the same as a Samsung Galaxy S3, which is about $200 more expensive. What's missing? Well, therein lies the rub: it has no GSM voice capabilities. This singular omission is probably the only thing preventing the Galaxy Camera from being a contender as your primary mobile device. (Apart from the fact that it'd look patently ridiculous when brought up to your ear, of course.)

The Galaxy Camera sports one of the largest screens ever on a digital camera

Ironically, it's on the photographic side of things that the Galaxy Camera is not quite as impressive. Its 16.3-MP, 1/2.3" sensor hooks up to a decent 23-481mm equivalent optical zoom lens with an aperture of f/2.8-5.9. (The minimum aperture is, inexplicably, just f/8.0.) This 21x zoom range is reasonable, if slightly aggressive, for your average point-and-shoot. I suppose Samsung decided that optical zoom is the one thing this device has that sets it apart from your average iPhone or Lumia, and they'd largely be right. The sensor's definitely good, but only when measured against the diminutive sensor of your average smartphone. Against competing point-and-shoots, it doesn't make much of a splash. (Although at 300+ grams it's also so heavy that if you chucked it in the pool it would probably make a _huge_ splash.)

The size is something you'll either love or hate. When I took it out of the box I was shocked by how big it was; I was expecting something like an S3 in terms of footprint, but it was also very thick and had a real heft to it. When I flipped it over though, my reaction became significantly more positive. Its LCD is huge: 4.8" across, which makes it one of the largest screens you'll see on a camera. To give you an idea of how big that is, my entire iPhone 4S fits inside the active area with room to spare. Even a professional-level camera like Canon's 5D Mark III only has a 3.2" LCD, and most point-and-shoots will have something in the 3-3.5" range.

This makes previewing your images a very pleasant experience, as the screen has a resolution of 1280x720 and a pixel density of 306ppi (the iPhone's retina display is just a touch more dense, at 326). There are almost no physical buttons on this device, so everything photography-related is done on the sturdy Gorilla Glass 2 touchscreen. (The only hardware buttons are the power, shutter release, zoom lever, and flash.) I've never preferred cameras with onscreen controls, but in this one case, where the entire back of the thing is a gorgeous LCD, I'm willing to make an exception. It's still slower than having physical buttons, but it does seem as if the tactile approach is by-and-large reserved for only the professional imagers these days.

Image stabilization is quite good: the image above is a handheld, 0.5-second exposure.

Performance-wise, it's a mixed bag. The image stabilization is quite good, allowing me to handhold a reasonably sharp exposure at 0.5-second at its widest angle. The shutter release is responsive enough, although don't expect to be shooting alot of sports or fast action. Autofocus hunts like a dog in low-light, but that's a common ailment in cameras of this class. Disappointingly, there are only two settings for the flash: "Auto" and "Off." You'd think they could at least give us a three-stop crank for the flash power, but sadly, that wasn't on the cards. Still, there's enough manual control to allow for some creativity here, and I can imagine that quite a few pros would find this a rather fun camera to have with them when they're not on the clock. 

Samsung was generous enough to throw in 50gb of Dropbox space with the Galaxy, and you can set it up so that all of your images and video are automatically synchronized as you take them. It's an awesome feature, and I can foresee a scenario where you could be covering an event with several of these cameras and have all your images uploaded in real-time to a central, shared Dropbox folder for processing and posting. No more swapping SD cards, or waiting to upload images in bulk at the end of the day.

The one area where the camera is unequivocally weak is battery life, lasting less than 5 hours when shooting continuously. For a camera of this size and make, that's not terrible, but for a phone it's downright awful. Thankfully, it uses the same replaceable battery as the Galaxy S2, which you can purchase for just 900php ($20). It's the cheapest camera battery I've ever bought by far, so when I first acquired the camera I immediately purchased 2 extra backups for good measure.

The other area that badly needs improvement is in-camera photo-editing, although this is largely one of those "cart-before-the-horse" problems. There are only a handful of photo-editing Android apps out there that retain the full image quality of a photo as it's being manipulated, because neither lens quality or processing power have really reached the necessary levels to warrant that sort of fidelity until now. The problem of course is that the Galaxy Camera is capturing well over 5mb of data per image, and these cameraphone apps simply aren't built to handle that kind of size. Even Adobe Photoshop Express - and boy does that name have a lot to live up to - fudges things up tremendously by reducing your high-res photo to a terribly-compressed facsimile of just under 150kb in size. About the only app I could find that retained the image quality was the Pro version of PicsPlay, which although incomplete in its featureset (seriously, no Straighten?) at least preserves the very thing that this camera is meant to be good at.

After a little under a week's worth of walking around with this thing around my neck every day, I'm still on the fence on whether I'll be using it as my primary photographic device. I've owned DSLRs from both Canon and Nikon, and my current "serious" kit is a Panasonic Lumix GH2 with a Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95, and the Galaxy Camera is nowhere near any of those in terms of image quality or handling. (To be fair, only a handful of the very best P&S's will ever approach DSLR or m4/3 levels of quality, and that's a consequence of the laws of physics more than anything else.) It is however a sterling example of that oft-quoted notion that "convenience trumps fidelity," because it's both smaller than any of my other cameras and has the unique ability to process and share images without having to switch devices. There's no question that it's a tweener device - it's neither the best P&S you could buy or the best phone - but the intersection that it finds itself at is undoubtedly a useful one. After all, how many optical zoom cameras do you know that can turn themselves into podcast players, GPS navs, or portable wifi hotspots on demand?

Note: You can check out more sample images from the Samsung Galaxy Camera here.

The Nokia Lumia 710 from an iPhone User's Perspective

I found my way back into the Windows Mobile universe this weekend, after a lengthy absence. Prior to this, my last encounter with Windows on the small screen was with the HP iPaq 6500, a QWERTY-keyboard smartphone running Windows Mobile 2003, so I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has well and truly been awhile. I’d spent the past four years using the various iPhone incarnations exclusively and had never felt the need to explore what else was out there. Recently however, I’ve found myself becoming interested in the Windows Phone experience again. Partly this was because of my growing dissatisfaction with the iPhone 4S on the woefully unreliable Globe network, and partly because my startup was becoming more and more embroiled in the handheld space, so I needed to familiarize myself with all the various Apple competitors.

And so I found myself at a Smart Store earlier in the month queued up for a Nokia Lumia 710, which came free with their PhP1500/month unlimited data plan. Not surprisingly, you can’t just walk in, sign up for a postpaid plan and expect to walk back out with a working Lumia. There’s a 1-2 week wait for these models, which either implies that they’re short on stock, or that the demand isn’t particularly high (so they don’t keep them in their stores). You can buy a 710 from the local gray market for less than PhP13,000 these days, but since an unlimited data plan is all but required to really get the most of this phone, I just signed up with Smart and got it that way instead.

The Hardware Situation

On the surface, the Lumia 710 is a pretty little thing. It’s roughly the same height and width as the iPhone 4S, but it’s also chunkier and mostly made of plastic. It does feel lighter in the hand and, due to the more curvy body style, isn't quite as imposing as the hard-cornered Apple flagship. It’s important to note that it’s smack in the middle of the Lumia series, sandwiched between the entry-level 610 and the high-end 800 and 900. As such it feels like a very reasonable balance between price and performance, especially when you don’t necessarily care about the features that differentiate it from its big brothers. (The main differences include higher storage capacity, an AMOLED screen and a much more capable HSDPA antenna—which may or may not be fully usable in the Philippine setting.)

It predictably has more buttons than the iPhone: Along with the ubiquitous Home button, it has a volume control, an on/off switch, and dedicated hardware buttons for Back, Search and Camera. Of the three dedicated buttons, I found the Search button to be the most weird. Naturally, it uses Bing, and naturally you can’t switch to Google. This lack of choice is offset mildly by the fact that it has voice search and image search built right in, both of which seemed to work well enough without exactly bowling you over.

Interface Design Decisions

When Microsoft redesigned their mobile operating system, they took a long hard look at what Apple and Google were doing with their respective offerings and decided to go in a completely different direction. The most obvious distinction is in the use of the Metro-style Live Tiles, i.e., positionable blocks of content on the phone’s home screen that represent running applications and display a summary of that app’s contents. The Tiles interface is an interesting beast. There’s something very modern about a GUI that exposes multiple buckets of content in a neatly structured, annotated way, and I certainly enjoyed organizing my tiles to maximize the information I could view at a glance. The problem is that it’s really just a matter of perception. Although the various running apps on iOS don’t show you their contents unless you click on them, most of the time-sensitive ones will have a red badge alerting you to important content.

The average iOS home screen will have 20 icons on it, with each one of them having the potential to call your attention when necessary. On Windows Phone 7.5, you can usually only fit 7-8 tiles within the immediately viewable 480×800 area, which is actually less stuff, not more. And even if you had 20 tiles on your WP home screen, you’d need to scroll past each one to see which of them had new content for you, because the callouts can be pretty understated.

Don’t get me wrong—I like the WP solution quite a bit. It’s a nice approach, and it certainly distinguishes itself from its competitors with its great sense of proportion and tastefully minimal transitions. I just don’t buy that it’s functionally superior from a usability standpoint.

My hesitation extends to some of its integration decisions as well:

The People app, for example, is part Address Book and part News Feed, compiling your contacts from all your various accounts into a single huge directory on one screen and then displaying their aggregated status messages and media on another. I personally found this to be a strange choice, as the Address Book view can only seem to fit 6 names before you need to scroll down. Granted, the font size is huge and very readable, but these are names I’m already familiar with; surely they could have tried to fit 10 people on there? The News Feed view (called “What’s New”) meanwhile can only fit three new posts on screen before the user needs to start scrolling. This is all due to the fact that a good 100px of vertical space is taken up by the huge “People” header at the top of the screen, which certainly looks nice, but doesn’t feel particularly efficient in such a constrained medium.

This same spatial extravagance is on display in nearly every app, with inordinately large headers screaming the names of the apps that the user had only just clicked on. I’m personally not bothered by these design choices, but I felt that they were indicative of how much the interface is influenced by form instead of function. In a world where everything is three-dimensional glossy rounded-corners, the stark vector icons against simple, monotone blocks is certainly a refreshing, if a bit eager, strategy. This allows for some really beautiful, minimalistic transitions between app and home screen, with the blocks cascading into and out of place like shutters being blown by the wind.

The Software Situation

Windows Phone 7.5 is meant to be paired with the Zune app on the desktop in much the same way as the iPhone goes hand-in-hand with iTunes. In this respect, the two companies couldn’t be more similar. The Zune/iTunes desktop app is responsible for synchronizing your content to the phone, as well as managing software updates and storing backups. When I plugged in the Lumia for the first time, I found a bunch of software update packages waiting to be downloaded. One key update contained software for Internet Sharing, which allowed me to turn the 710 into a mobile hotspot in the same way you would with an iPhone or any number of Android phones. Very handy indeed when you consider that the antenna on the Lumia is capable of 14.4 Mbps HSDPA. (Its big brother, the 900, can even hit 42Mbps.)

Apart from synchronizing and updating via Zune, Windows Phone also has its own App Store equivalent, dubbed “Marketplace.” My initial impression is that it’s a ghost town; loads of Solitaire, Chess or Texas Hold ‘Em variants peppered with some truly bizarre clones of iOS originals. (My current favorite is Angry at the Birds a ridiculous mashup of Duck Hunt, Fruit Ninja and the Rovio blockbuster it stole its name from.) Don’t bother looking for Evernote, Dropbox or Instagram here. Few of the iOS heavyweights have thus far made any moves into the WP platform, although enterprising developers are trying to take advantage of their APIs and relative inertia to cash in on their absence.

This dearth is perhaps the most obvious failing for Windows Phone, press releases to the contrary. Granted this is the same chicken-and-egg problem Blackberry faces with its own App World : the developers won’t write new software until there are more users to sell them to, but the users won’t buy phones unless there is software to improve them. It’s important to remember that the only reason Apple didn’t look pathetic during the early days of iPhone and its App Store was because there was nothing out there to compare it to. Nowadays you have to worry about Android apps totalling nearly half a million and iOS itself sporting over 650,000. Windows Phone’s app population, sitting just south of a hundred thousand, feels miniscule by comparison.

Overall

The bottom line is that this is not a bad phone. It’s not a particularly good phone either, largely because the software library is very thin. Its design sensibilities feel fancy for the sake of being fancy, which may or may not bother you depending on how much utility you need to squeeze out of your device. A part of me really likes its various contemporary flourishes and its opinionated approach to app UI, but I think that that’s because there’s no real lock-in here: I know I can just grab the iPhone whenever I want to actually accomplish something.

I probably wouldn’t feel the same about it if the Lumia 710 was the only phone I had though.