I'll never forget the time I visited a Riverwalk restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, and ordered risotto. The dish is one of my favorites: rice that's been stirred in broth until it's rich, creamy and perfect. But what the waiter brought to the table wasn't risotto. It was just rice. A bowl of yellow rice.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said to the waiter. "I actually ordered the risotto?"

The guy looked at me like I was the village idiot. "What do you think risotto means? It means 'rice' in Italian. That's what you got."

I thought of that "risotto" last week when T-Mobile released the Samsung Memoir, the first 8-megapixel cameraphone in the United States. It costs $250 with two-year contract, after $50 rebate.

See, high-tech companies play that same name game all the time. They get you all excited about some pocket camera by saying that it takes "high-definition" videos - but even though the video has the qualifying number of pixels, it looks awful. Or they'll get you fired up because their new cellphone has a "touch screen" - but it turns out to be stiff, balky and not worth it.

So when Samsung says that the Memoir takes 8-megapixel photos, your first question should be: "So?" If the sensor, lens and circuitry are standard mobile phone junk, having a lot of megapixels won't do anything to improve the picture quality.

Fortunately, the pictures from this phone really are very good, at least for a phone. Unfortunately, the remainder of the Memoir is only mediocre.

The concept of a phone camera - as opposed to a camera phone - isn't new. Whereas a camera phone is a mobile phone with a tacked- on cheapo camera, a phone camera, like the Memoir, is designed to give equal weight to the camera part.

Like the excellent Motorola/Kodak Motozine ZN5, also from T- Mobile, the Memoir looks like a cellphone on one side and a digital camera on the other. When you hold the thing horizontally, you find a shutter button under your right index finger, and zoom in/out buttons (which double as the volume keys) under your left index finger.

There's a real flash - a xenon flash, brighter than LED but not as bright as a real camera's flash - and a true autofocus mechanism. On the big, bright touch screen, you can tap icons to access an array of camera controls, many gimmicky and ineffectual: white balance, exposure adjustment, scene modes, ISO (light sensitivity), anti-shake and so on. There's even Smile Shot, where the camera waits to take a picture until the subject is smiling (it works), and Blink Shot, where the camera doesn't shoot if the subject's eyes are closed (it doesn't really work).

There's also a memory card and a USB jack for transferring the photos to your computer.

The photos are surprisingly good, especially in bright light. The colors are true, and the detail is about what you'd expect from a cheap digital camera.

They are not, as the marketing would have you believe, good enough that you can "leave your digital camera at home." The Memoir is just too slow for that. It takes four seconds to start up the camera mode, six seconds between shots. Worse, the shutter lag is something fierce; the camera sometimes waits a good two seconds after you press the shutter button. Moving subjects are almost always blurry. So as long as you're still and so is your subject, you'll be in good shape, but that rules out an awful lot of photographic situations.

You should also know that there is no macro (close-up) mode. Tragically, there is no zoom, either. Oh, there is a digital zoom, but that just means "blowing up your picture so the photo quality deteriorates."

Even so, the camera on the Memoir is almost certainly better than the camera on your current phone. Unfortunately, the phone portion isn't quite so inspiring.

Ever since the iPhone showed it the way, Samsung has seemed obsessed with touch-screen phones. It has not yet learned the lesson, however, that a touch screen doesn't gain you anything unless both it and the underlying software are finely tuned and carefully considered. On the Memoir (which runs the same touch software as its predecessor, the Behold), it's neither.

For example, the whole machine is slow; some of the animations are sluggish and jerky. The screen gives a little buzzy vibration with each finger touch, which is supposed to be neato but actually seems a little pointless.

Furthermore, there are at least four places to look for a certain function or program: on the "widgets bar" down the left side of the screen; on the "desktop" (where you can drag about three of your favorite widgets); on the Menu page of programs; in the Applications folder within the Menu page; or inside the Games and Apps folder within that folder. What is this, Windows Mobile?

The Done button sometimes appears at the lower right of a screen, and other times at the lower left. Icons on the Widget bar have no text labels, so there is no way to find out what one is without tapping it, which opens it.

In some programs, turning the phone 90 degrees, so it's horizontal, produces an on-screen, full Qwerty keyboard layout, so typing is fairly easy. But there are no typing shortcuts like the ones on the BlackBerry, the Treo and the iPhone. So you can't type "cant" for "can't," and hitting the Space bar twice doesn't produce a period, space and capitalized next letter.

There is a Web browser on this thing, but you may do a lot of waiting for it; the phone lacks Wi-Fi for fast wireless downloads. It's capable of accessing T-Mobile's 3G (meaning high-speed) Internet network, but that is only available in certain U.S. cities.

The bigger problem, though, is that you feel as though you are looking at the Web through a keyhole. Each Web page appears at full size on the little phone screen, so you are constantly scrolling around with your finger just to read the end of each sentence. You can zoom in, but you can't zoom out from that actual-size starting point. There is no multitouch on this phone, so you can't pinch or spread two fingers to adjust the zoom levels.

The checklist meister at Samsung was certainly working overtime on this baby. It's got crude e-mail, voice dialing, chat and (for $10 a month) a slowish GPS navigation feature that gives you turn- by-turn driving directions. There is a simple music-playback program; unfortunately, there is no standard headphone jack, so you can't replace the Memoir's hard plastic earbuds with something more comfortable.

The Memoir also has one of the worst manuals ever written - it's one of these pointless documents with explanations like "ISO: allows you to adjust the ISO sensitivity."

As a phone, the Memoir does all right. Sound quality is average and battery life is good (five hours of talk time). Since this is a touch screen, there are no speed-dial keys, although the voice dialing is a consolation. Finally, keep in mind that you are using T- Mobile's U.S. cellular network, which means that you will find plenty of dead spots in your travels.

Let there be no mistake: the Memoir's camera produces some of the best photos in cellphone photography today. Unfortunately, the rest of the machine is a mishmash of unevenly executed features, dumped in willy-nilly. And as any chef can tell you, just throwing in every ingredient on your shelf won't produce a delicious dish.

Source:http://myces.bdmetrics.com