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SINGAPORE : Today's mobile phone has become an amalgamation of portable digital devices, from global positioning systems (GPS) to digital compact cameras. Attempting to replace the digital camera entirely, the LG GC900 Viewty Smart (S$768, without contract) stuffs a massive 8-megapixel auto-focus camera with ISO sensitivity of up to 1,600 into a sleek 12.4mm shell. The quad-band 3.5G phone touts a power LED flash, face and smile detection, and geo-tagging support.
Picture quality is surprisingly admirable, with accurate colour reproduction and good rendition of details. Unfortunately, you can only achieve this result with good lighting and at ISO 100. In poorer lighting, you can see the shortcomings of packing a miniscule lens and a tiny image sensor like sardines. Colour noise artifacts begin to appear in the shadow areas in ISO 100. At ISO 400, it is a virtual chromatic noise exhibition.
Each shot has a 2-second shutter lag, exacerbated by the slow auto-focus. It can take up to four seconds to grab a shot. And you have to tap a button to take another shot.
The phone can also shoot VGA clips of up to 720x480 at 30 frames per second, and even record videos in slow or fast motion. However, you cannot zoom during video capture and the focusing is rather slow. Captured videos lack sharpness and contrast.
The sharp 3-inch LCD screen uses multi-touch input and accelerometer support via LG's S-Class user interface, but it is laggy.
Note that the phone does not have a standard earphone jack. So, you have to make do with the bundled headset that uses the mini-USB port. Be careful, as the mini-USB port's filmsy cover might break. Only 1.5GB of memory resides within the phone but it can be expanded up to 32GB via a microSD slot.
Other features of the Viewty Smart include a voice recorder, an FM radio and assisted-GPS with Google Maps. Setting up an email account is easy - I managed to send and receive emails in under three minutes.
Another feature or quirk, depending on how you look at it, is the option of using a T9 keypad or a Qwerty keyboard. Turn to portrait to use the T9 keypad, or rotate to landscape to use the Qwerty keyboard.
Nokia N86 8MP
To quench the ever-growing thirst for pixels, Nokia has equipped its latest N series handset with an 8-megapixel auto-focus camera and named it "N86 8MP" (S$808, without contract) to drive home the point.
Available in black or white, the 3.5G slider sports a 2.6-inch Amoled screen and a 28mm wide-angle lens with variable aperture, mechanical shutter and dual LED flash. It supports geo-tagging of captured photos with A-GPS as well.
Running Symbian OS 9.3, the N86 touts 8GB built-in memory, which is expandable to 16GB via a micro SD card. But you have to remove the rear cover to slot in the card.
Slide up the phone and you'll see a cramped number pad, which makes for a trying time when it comes to SMSing. Almost all the label-less buttons on its face are small. Even the directional button is iffy and prone to error presses.
The phone's menu interface is intuitive ... except in camera mode. With the problematic directional button, you tend to click on the wrong options or switch to zooming unintentionally. What's worse, the settings reset each time you exit camera mode.
You can do a half-press on the camera button to focus and a full press to take a picture. But there is no optical zoom. While you can change settings like white balance, colour tone and sharpness, the camera works fine in auto mode. For example, in panoramic mode, you just need to take the first picture, pan and the phone will pick up the next few pictures, shoot them and stitch them up. The resulting picture is surprisingly accurate if you pan slowly.
Unfortunately, pixel rendition is patchy and you can see the noise grains upon close examination. In poor lighting conditions, the picture tends to become "water-colourish".
In addition, the flash does not provide adequate illumination.
It's the same story for the 640x480 (30 frames per second) video-capture function. Although you can zoom in and out during video recording, it suffers the same quality loss and picks up quite a bit of ambient audio.
- TODAY/il
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