Samsung Memoir cellphone sports a nice camera

— -- Even if you don't carry a fancy smartphone, the phone in your pocket more than likely doubles as a camera. Yet few people shop for a cellphone based on its ability to snap photos.

T-Mobile is touting the imaging capabilities of the Samsung Memoir I've been testing. The recently arrived handset is billed as the first 8-megapixel camera-phone sold in the USA. It retails for $250 with a two-year contract. Sony Ericsson is on its heels with the C905 Cyber-shot 8-megapixel camera-phone — but has yet to announce pricing, release date or carrier.

Many factors contribute to image quality. So the importance of pixel counts is sometimes overrated by marketers. The Memoir, in theory, is in the company of a typical point-and-shoot. But in my view, it's not an ideal substitute.

For a phone, Memoir's camera (which includes video) is first-rate, if at times frustrating. Many pictures I shot were quite good. Memoir has a Xenon flash, white balance and several scene and shooting modes — including continuous, panorama and smile shot. The latter is a feature in which the camera is supposed to snap a picture only when your subject smiles. It worked sometimes, albeit slowly. Good luck getting your kids to pose. The camera's blink detection is supposed to warn you when your subject blinks. Yet I still got squinty pictures.

Shutter lag, in general, is a problem for Memoir, resulting in some out-of-focus action shots.

The camera aside, Memoir is a benchwarmer compared with other touch-screen smartphones, especially when it comes to such basics as e-mail and mobile Web browsing. The touch-screen was hard to master. Barely tapping some icons opens them; on some screens, you have to press and drag with authority to scroll.

Let's zoom in for a closer look:

The camera.

You'd be hard-pressed to even recognize Memoir as a phone, if it's sitting camera-side up. What's visible are the auto-focus lens and flash. "Samsung" and "8.0 megapixels" are plastered on the front. You have to flip it over to see "T-Mobile."

Pick the device up so that the lens is facing outward to take a picture, and the camera shutter button is on the top right, just where you'd want it. Zoom buttons are in a prime spot on the top left, though I wish the camera had a true optical zoom instead of a 16x digital zoom.

Overall, the thin device feels sturdy and comfortable and is handsome in black with silver trim.

As with many standard point-and-shoots, you frame your shot with the display on the back. There's no optical viewfinder. After tapping an icon or pushing a button, the small protective lens cover slides open and you see a smart shooting menu. You can tap small icons to easily change shooting modes, toggle between a still camera and video, turn the flash on or off and adjust other settings.

You can upload images from the camera to Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Photobucket and Snapfish — or to an album at T-Mobile.com. But I had trouble transferring pictures to a computer via USB. At first the USB wasn't recognized by my PC at all, because Bluetooth in the camera was turned on. Later, the pictures still didn't show up on my PC because I had to manually copy them onto the supplied 1-gigabyte microSD card, which needed to be formatted inside the camera. Can anybody spell arduous?

Using Memoir's GPS smarts, images can be "geotagged" with the location in which they were shot. You can also use the GPS for turn-by-turn directions with a $10 monthly TeleNav subscription.

Phone.

Memoir is an OK phone with decent battery life, speakerphone and voice dialing. It supports MMS (picture messaging). On-screen keypads and keyboards differ depending on how you hold the phone and what application you're in. For example, in the Web browser, there's a dedicated "www." key.

As with the iPhone, there's an accelerometer that can change the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape when you hold it sideways. But Memoir's browser is anything but memorable. I couldn't fit everything on the screen without dragging my finger around. And without Wi-Fi, you're at the mercy of T-Mobile's network. Its fastest 3G network isn't everywhere. E-mail is slow and clumsy. Memoir supports Bluetooth stereo for music. Without a standard audio jack, I was restricted to the uncomfortable headphones that came in the box.

If you need a fine camera-phone and want to carry only one device, you could do a lot worse than Memoir. But the complete picture is blurry.

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com