Not all phones are created equal, which is why after months of being on the market and after the recent hoopla about the new Apple iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre it’s still worthwhile to take a look at the Samsung Memoir T929. As a camera phone, the Memoir is worth its weight as it clocks in with 8.0 megapixels, which means that if you’re a casual snapshot shooter, you have all you need here (especially since the most you really need to take decent pictures is 6 megapixels – although the industry would have you believe two things: 1) you need 12 megapixels on your point-and-shoot camera and 2) a good camera phone has 3 megapixels while an outstanding one has 5). Also, with adjustable ISO settings, the Samsung Memoir captures spectacular images in three resolutions ranging from 3,264 x 2,448 to 320 x 240. Plus there’s video; take that iPhone 3G S with your measly 3 megapixels and video-ability attitude like its something to write home about.
There is a downside to the Samsung Memoir, however, and that’s its lack of Wi-Fi. That’s compensated with the awesome ability to quickly upload embarrassing photos of your friends making jackasses of themselves to such sites as Flickr or Photobucket through a 3G connection. For the road-warrior wonderer, you’ll be happy to see such features as a currency converter, a calculator, GPS support, task list, 2,000-entry contact list, an alarm clock, and a world clock among other features. And before I neglect to mention them, there’s also Bluetooth stereo and a full HTML browser.
Undressing the Samsung Memoir
Beyond the three permanent keys below the 262,000-color 2.6-inch screen (Talk, Back, and End/Power), there’s a dedicated .com button on the touchscreen with accelerometer. Like other Samsung products, the Memoir has the TouchWiz interface that gives you a bunch of widgets. The music player isn’t anything special and has much the same features and browsing style found on the iPhone or iPod. Inside the Samsung Memoir T929 is a fairly robust 100MB of onboard memory, but that’s expandable to 8GB via microSD. As an MMS device, it comes as welcome news that the Memoir can reportedly upload a 2.2MB image in seconds. Also, through the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900), the call quality is loud and clear, which should make conversing with your deaf grandparents much easier.
Though not as flashy as the iPhone (but, really, do we all want Nissan GTRs?), the Samsung Memoir looks more camera than cell phone and gives you 5.5 hours of talk time and 12.5 days of standby. If you consider the fact that you likely won’t have to buy another digital camera for a while, the Samsung Memoir is a steal at an estimated price of $580.