Compare and Buy The Best Samsung G800 Contract Deals

 
The Hottest Camera Phone On the Market

Ever since Nokia put out the N90, the bar has been raised for camera phones and camera phone manufacturers, to make a camera phone that can actually replace your stand alone digital camera. While the Samsung G800 won’t do that for a professional photographer, for most amateurs, it’s an effective camera replacement for taking with you on a family holiday, and is currently the most photography friendly camera phone on the market.

In form factor, it’s a bit of a brick, at a quarter pound (130 grams) and kind of chunky. It’s not going to fit into your pants pocket easily, and it probably doesn’t accessorize a mini skirt terribly well, but if you’re going after this phone, the odds that you own a mini skirt appear pretty low.

The camera has a 5 megapixel CCD, like all the other high end camera phones do. What makes it remarkable is that Samsung also managed to cram in a 3x optical zoom feature and a face recognizer to tweak the autofocus sections. Given how many camera phones just toy with your inner Ansel Adams with a “digital zoom” (really, a pixel interpolation algorithm that fools only the novices), this is a remarkable achievement.

 
 
However, there’s more. The professional grade xenon flash gives excellent saturation and color response, and is far superior to the LED flashes the other 5 megapixel cameras have. The onboard software gives you a lot of options, including color correction, contrast adjustment and even a limited crop feature. The large color screen makes this a joy to use, and makes the menu driven system for its phone functions quite nice as well.

As a communications device, the G800 uses the HSDPA network, which means it’s blazingly fast for downloads, though it lacks a WiFi connection, which is disappointing. It requires that you use HSDPA to get your photos from the camera to your computer for real editing and emailing them. We hope that there will be an update adding WiFi.

The phone itself offers good sound quality, and the software is up to Samsung’s normal offerings. It works as a music player, covering all the standard formats, though that’s hardly remarkable given the state of the market. The integrated address book and phone book are suitable, and would have merited great praise two years ago, but are run of the mill now.

All in all, if you’re a shutterbug, and want something you can take semi-pro photographs with, that will always be on your person, we can recommend this one quite highly. Do make sure your data plan won’t bankrupt you in getting your photos off the mobile, though.

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