The introduction of 4GS Apple iPhone with a 5 mega pixel integrated camera has changed the landscape of photography forever. IPhone 4G comes with amazing features that were available only on high-end digital SLR cameras or with various software programs for desktop computers a few years ago.

Today you can customize your iPhone 4 with more than 6,000 applications that are designed to enhance and improve the experience of the iPhone camera. While most of these applications cost less than a couple of dollars, that will make your photos beyond incredible! Here are five fun, fresh and creative applications that will turn your photos into masterpieces.

ProCamera – This application incorporates state of the art technology, offering separate focus and exposure controls for both photos and video. It has features like Anti Shake, Power Zoom, a Self-Timer, Virtual Horizons and Grids, multiple shots and a Full Screen Trigger. This application will give you all the bells and whistles you’ll need to turn the iPhone camera into a camera pro. You will get a bit ‘of everything – including filters and effects, cropping and editing functions, including direct posting to the popular online social network.

Camera +-Some people find the need to touch the screen of the iPhone to take a picture embarrassing or even irritating. The makers of camera + provide users with an intelligent solution, the volume button of the phone are perfectly positioned under your thumb or index finger when using the screen as a viewfinder. The stabilization feature is a motion sensor that ends blur. There is also a self-timer and burst mode two-a-second. You can crop, rotate, or sharpen a photo, add a border and apply effects to your photos as black and white, sepia, and more.

Hipstamatic – If you are back in stock, this is the perfect application for you. It offers filtering software to reveal the images of the era. Hipstamatic turns the screen of your iPhone into a perfect replica of a plastic toy camera of the past. It ‘s funny cool and really creative. Filters to make images look as if they were taken with a camera vintage film. Special filters make all images appear old and older. It includes classics like Lomography format, Polaroid and square format. This application also includes social media features to immediately share with others.

Panorama – You want a big picture broader landscape? This apps take a panoramic photo with your iPhone. You can create a beautiful panoramic image without a computer! The application magically stitches together photos horizontal and vertical images to merge into one huge image. Perfect for outdoor scenery or landscape images.

100 cameras – do not have to be a pro to understand this application. You can take a photo, or choose one from your library and then browse and choose from 100 possible effects and filters to the final result. You can not beat the attractiveness and creativity of 100 cameras. It ‘s really fun and easy to use. Best of all, one operation, send your masterpiece to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Smugmug, Dropbox, e-mail or printer.

“The best camera is the one you have with you.” Always make sure you have your iPhone with you. The rest can be done at the Apple Apps store!

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Generally speaking, a convertible tablet PC is on which can be transformed from a laptop configuration to that of a hand held tablet. The main driving force behind development of these machines is the requirement by many users for handy portability and the ability to work requiring less space.

It is worth bearing in mind that there are 2 distinct camps within the Tablet PC market. There are lightweight tablets, or slates, which do not have a keyboard and rely solely on the touch screen interface, such as the Apple iPad and there are laptops which convert into a touch screen tablet by rotating the screen and laying it flat on top of the keyboard, such as the Dell Inspiron Duo. It is the later category that this article is concerned with simply because the computing power of the iPad and its slate clones do not have a powerful enough processor to allow them to carry out the full range of tasks and run the typical business applications that a laptop can.

Tablet PC Pros

The greatest advantage of Tablet PCs is their mobility. Small and light, the tablet pc allows you to work in any situation. All tablet pc’s share one thing in common, they use touch screen technology to allow you to input data on the very screen you are working on. This is why these machines are so small; in tablet mode you dispense with the keyboard and instead type on a virtual keyboard or handwrite with a stylus.

Another advantage of Tablet pc’s is that they can be used for drawing and illustration with the aid of a stylus. This allows for a more creative and free-flowing interaction with the digital paper.

Touch screen technology has advanced greatly over the last few years with the arrival of the iPhone & iPad and this has percolated throughout the entire industry to help create a whole new generation of devices that are easier to use and boast an enhanced user experience. With the widespread adoption of this technology, the prices for convertible tablet pc’s has also dropped rapidly and for the first time ever, this technology can be acquired for the same price as a standard mid-level laptop.

Tablet PC Cons

While these machines are much more portable than their desktop & laptop ancestors, they do tend to be heavier than the slate style tablet as they require more processor, graphics and hard drive space. However, newer models such as the Dell Duo offer netbook sized computing with the benefits of touch screen tablet usability while still having the power of a mid-level laptop.

Some of the older convertible tablet pc’s have an outdated touch screen which can be sluggish or can only be used with a stylus. This will indeed make them harder to use and the inclusion of finger touch screen capability would be preferable on any convertible laptop you are considering acquiring.

The Apple iPad has the best touch screen available at present. It is unfortunate that the manufacturer’s of convertible tablet pc’s have not been able to match its performance as the computing limitations of the iPad mean that it can really only be used for internet surfing, minor tasks and games/entertainment. Over the last few months we have seen the gap close with the release of the Dell Inspiron Duo and some of the expensive high level Hewlett Packard machines coming very close indeed.

Conclusion

If you want to have a mobile, multi-purpose touch screen tablet pc, that can cope with real computing tasks and run real application based software then you will need more than an iPad or Android based tablet. Convertible Tablet PC’s offer the best of both worlds. Despite being heavier and thicker than an Apple ipad, their benefits far outweigh those of the smaller lightweight tablets as they allow for real computing power as well as for entertainment.

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BUILD & DESIGN

While many current Android devices are thinly veiled attempts to mimic the iPhone, the Droid Pro clearly has another target: the segment of business users that are mostly addicted to the BlackBerry and it’s constant email access.

I’m not a BlackBerry user myself, but I am a member of the demographic that must have a keyboard, preferably in a one-piece design like this. So I came into this review curious about the Droid Pro, both because of it’s slightly unusual design, and because it seemed to have the qualities I look for in a smartphone: a great spec sheet, simple design, and — hopefully — a solid operating system.

Screen
A key difference between the Droid Pro and its rivals is that while QWERTY-bar phones often include a relatively small  screen with a landscape orientation, the Pro has a larger portrait-oriented screen. This makes it a little longer than it’s relatives within the class, but considering everything that is packed into this device, the Droid Pro is actually surprisingly compact.

Compared directly to my usual phone, a Samsung Jack, the Droid Pro is about a third of an inch taller — and that’s it. They’re the same width, and roughly the same thickness, though the Droid Pro is actually a tiny bit thinner over most of the casing, with a small bulge along the top rear. Even granted that my Jack is cheaper and is a year old, I was pleasantly surprised by the size.

Despite it’s compact footprint, it squeezes in a 3.1 inch, half-VGA screen — not the largest or highest resolution on an Android-based device, but roughly comparable to the first three generations of iPhones.

Keyboard
Given the device’s size constraints, I had been half expecting the keyboard to be cramped. So it was another pleasant surprise that it was, in fact, every bit as usable as the better thumb keyboards I’ve tried out.

Good key travel, key separation, and feel. The number keys are spread out along the top row, instead of being placed in a conventional grid formation. The good news, though is that this is made up for by a large and very usable on-screen keypad available from the phone dialer application. Or, you can just speak the number that you want to call — but we’ll get to that later.

Other Buttons & Controls
One of the ways the Droid Pro saves space is by not having a directional pad or directional control of any kind, which is a departure for most QWERTY-bar style phones. At first, I didn’t think that I was going to be happy about that omission. Now, after having gotten to use it a bit, I’m not nearly as put out as I expected to be. Yes, there’s some situations where it would be nice to have a physical directional control — particularly navigating cramped web page elements, or relocating a cursor for text entry. But for the most part I’ve gotten along quite well using touchscreen gestures for scrolling and practicing accurate fingertip clicking.

My biggest complaint about the Droid Pro’s design lies in the four navigation buttons right above the keyboard. Because they’re part of the screen, and therefore touch sensitive, it’s fairly easy to accidentally “push” them if your finger brushes the screen accidentally. Since the center two buttons — those most likely to be hit accidentally — both take you back out of the application you’re using, it can be very annoying to have to go back and re-start what you were doing. Since you can’t vary the sensitivity of these buttons — and they really do have a hair trigger — the only real cure for this is time and practice, to get used to having them there and not letting your fingers stray.

With the memory card tucked under the battery cover, the only open ports are the Micro-USB plug on the lower left hand side, and the 3.5 mm audio jack on top. It’s nice to have a standard audio plug again, though I wouldn’t object to having all the plugs on the bottom, so that I could have a nice car dock for the thing, but that’s rather a nitpick.

Overall, the build quality feels good, the design is sleek and very usable, and it packs all it’s features into a very reasonable size and weight.

PERFORMANCE

Even if you thought the physical design of the Motorola Droid Pro was a bit basic, you’ll love what’s under the hood. On paper, this model has almost everything you could possibly want packed into a business phone.

It starts with a hardware set designed for performance: a 1 GHz TI OMAP 3620 processor and 512 MB of RAM, plus 1.5 GB of internal storage for your data. There’s also a 2 GB microSD card included.

All of this stacks up to mean amazing performance. Full-screen transitions, sliding gestures, window animations, even with plenty of stuff running in the background, it was all as smooth as an oil slick behind a Zamboni. I’m certain that there’s some situation or program which could slow this thing down, but I couldn’t find it, even when running high end games or applications.

Wireless/Call Quality
Add to that high performance base the standard wireless accessories: CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A for-voice and data on Verizon in the U.S., GPS with network-assistance and geotagging, WiFi b/g/n, and Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR.

Then you start on the rarer components. A secondary cell phone connection in the form of quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band HSPA adds worldwide coverage: unlike most Verizon phones, you can take this phone overseas and it will still work.

Mind you, if you intend to use Verizon’s overseas roaming service you’re going to be charged by the limb, but that’s kind of to be expected. You can, of course, get the GSM module unlocked, and then use cheaper prepaid services around the world, at the expense of not having your usual phone number.

It also features dual CDMA antennas for better than average signal performance, giving me multiple bars in areas that are normally sketchy.

Productivity
Despite the fact that I’ve been neck deep in mobile technology for many years, the Droid Pro is actually my first extended chance to use a device running Google’s Android OS. I was very curious to see how it would turn out, since I hadn’t really developed a firm impression or opinion of the Android platform from the brief look and play opportunities I’d had.

My first impressions were extremely positive. Granted one has to attribute a lot of the software experience to having good quality hardware behind it — the smooth-as-glass performance, the advanced looks, and the robust storage all help to ease the learning curve. But more important than the performance is the true software experience. Complete interoperability between applications, down to the level of being able to hand off a scanned barcode from one app to another from a different, competing developer. Or the integration of OS-level security into the mix to allow you the protection of guaranteed apps, as well as the freedom to go beyond what Google gives you.

Speaking of apps, they’re the centerpiece of the experience. The minute that I got into the Android Marketplace, I think I fell in love. It is, to put it simply, the sort of one-look-one-touch system for finding and installing applications I’ve been looking for for years. Or put another way, the thing that Microsoft never did for Windows Mobile, and should have. If it had, the company might have been in the position Google is right now, instead of having to jettison their entire former platform and start over.

The apps that come with the Droid Pro are basic but good — a complete Office suite and PDF viewer, multiple-account email client with support for a variety of platforms, navigation apps (both Google’s own and Verizon’s VZ Navigator), along with the usual packing peanuts.

Unsurprisingly, the device’s email implementation is most friendly toward GMail. Since I normally use Exchange Server synchronization on my Samsung Jack, I attempted to set up the same, only to discover that it’s a little more complicated. Not that I should be surprised, since Exchange is a Microsoft platform, and here I am asking it to play nice with Google. Eventually, I got it working with the help of the instructions off the Motorola website, but the lesson is to plan for a little more complexity when interfacing across platform brands. Nevertheless, it does work out of the box, even before the wandering eye is drawn to Google’s support framework.

Here’s what I did: I touched the button on the phone marked “Marketplace.” About ten seconds later I was scrolling through a list of hundreds of brilliant, absolutely free applications, all of which could be downloaded and installed in the background with two button presses, while I kept searching for more apps. It’s hard to overstate how easy to use it is.

And these aren’t your run of the mill free calculators and miniature pocket dictionaries. These are some amazingly powerful applications. One of the first ones I downloaded was Google Translate — and if you’ve never actually seen this app in action, it is hard to describe just how impressive it is. Speak any phrase into it, and within seconds it can read aloud a proper translation for the phrase in the language of your choice. This ranges from “Where is the airport” to “Do you enjoy anchovies on your pizza?” For that matter, it will tell you how to ask about anchovies in Welsh or Yiddish.

Or let’s talk about Google Sky Map. This free app uses the device’s internal gyrosensor to track where exactly you’re pointing the thing, and act like a perfect window to display constellations through, and can adjust the orientation automatically based on your GPS location.

Or ZXing Barcode Scanner, which can use the camera to automatically read and look up both 2D and 3D barcodes, including the QR codes that provide instant links to application downloads or websites. And it reads them right off the computer screen.

From Google-search-by-voice to recording DVD-resolution video; from being able to solve complicated math questions almost as fast as you can read them out loud to being able to signal in Morse code using the camera’s LED flash, the standard software package is impressive, and the available add-ons are even more so.

I also need to mention the voice command integration. The impressive part about the Droid Pro’s voice command system isn’t that Android has it — we’ve been experimenting with voice-commanded computers for a very long time. The impressive part is how ruthlessly accurate it is. I have yet to have it get a word wrong when I’m enunciating properly, and it’s still far better than 90% when speaking casually. In fact, I just read the previous sentence to it, and it picked the thing up word for word. I even tested it with obscure, easily missed words like “ferrets,” “anchovies,” and “Wookie.” For the record, it had the most trouble with “ferrets,” which it mistook about half the time for “parents.” But it recognized “Wookie” fine.

In a much more practical application, right out of the box you can order it to dial your contacts by name — without recording voice tags or doing any other setup work. Once it had slurped down my contact information, I simply said “Call Adama,” and my regular cell phone was ringing. You can also dictate text messages and emails with a fair degree of accuracy — not something that you’d need to do in most circumstances, but highly useful if, say, you’re driving somewhere and need to write an urgent reply.

Entertainment
The Droid Pro isn’t sold as a multimedia phone — it’s solidly targeted at business users, a fact Motorola isn’t shy of, emphasizing the bundling of Office applications and the strong password administration support. But make no mistake, if you don’t mind the slightly smaller screen, you can have a very happy multimedia experience.

To emphasize that, the Droid Pro comes equipped for working with Digital Living Network Alliance products, a system for allowing various entertainment products to work together. For instance, being able to stream video from a set-top digital video recorder, or use the Droid Pro to control the interaction of other DLNA equipment like a remote. Lacking any other DLNA-certified equipment, I couldn’t really test this, but the concept looks like it could be brilliant if it takes off and is implemented well.

Even the default browser is quite comfortable, more so even than my usual standby of Opera Mini. I suspect that would change outside of 3G range and the high browsing speed it provides, but for now, the dynamic zoom and automatic reflowing win the day.

As mentioned above, the Droid Pro is faster than hell. And it handles all it’s applications like a champion, even the high end ones that it’s not marketed towards.

Battery Life
The only sour note I have to sound about the Droid Pro’s performance is the one which, when you think about it, is fairly obvious. The more you use all that amazing hardware, the faster you’re going to eat the battery.

I had my review unit fully charged at 2:30, and by 7 PM with all the playing I had done, the battery was down to 15%. I’ve seen worse, but it’s certainly nothing to write home about. I’m accustomed to getting a full day of heavy use, but that expectation isn’t based on a larger screen and what is, in fact, a relatively small battery for the hardware it’s powering.

There’s a nifty little OS component that will tell you in detail what is consuming your battery life. To no surprise, 65% of my power drain was in the form of the screen. The Droid Pro does have a setting to automatically adjust the screen’s brightness, however the automatic setting is too low for my taste relative to the ambient lighting, and unlike on other devices with a light sensor, you can’t give it any guidance as to whether you’d like it just a little brighter or darker than its defaults.

It doesn’t help that Android’s default menus and screens are almost all white text on black backgrounds, making them much harder to see in a lit environment. Indeed, I had to turn up the brightness considerably to be able to see clearly, which led me to my second noteworthy complaint. Specifically, Android doesn’t make it easy for you to choose anything but the default color scheme. There is no way built into the device to choose different colors, and even with some of the third party launcher replacements, you can only get part of the way. I installed ADW Launcher, which allowed me to change the color of the app drawer, but menus were still all white text on black backdrop.

This may seem like a little thing, but it’s important because it has to do with user comfort. Users shouldn’t need to crank up their screen brightness to compensate for absurdly dark colors they can’t change. When you’re not dealing with that, the automatic screen brightness is much more to my taste.

As far as the larger power issue goes, there are some settings you can tweak to help reduce battery drain, such as the frequency of data and GPS updates, there’s supposed to be an extended battery option available soon through Verizon, however it’s rated at 1820 mAh, only 28% larger than the standard 1420 mAh cell. I’d really like to see an option to add a little padding to the entire back of the device in trade for, say, 2 to 2.5 times the standard battery power. That would give the power hogs like myself the guarantee that we could get through a rough day without worrying overmuch about conserving juice. If I’m lost and depending on the GPS, or making a lot of calls to manage a situation, I don’t want to worry whether the battery will hold out.

While these two things are my biggest issues with the Droid Pro as a device, in the big picture they’re relatively minimal. Both can be either fixed or reduced by software eventually, and frequent charging is a reality of life for smartphone users, particularly high end ones.

CONCLUSION

I have to say that it’s been quite a long while since I got the raw thrill from playing with a gadget that I have from the Motorola Droid Pro.

While it’s obvious that the state of the art in mobile tech improves, the difference is more than just a hardware upgrade — it’s the fact that the Droid Pro and the Android platform are well thought out and robust in ways that others simply aren’t.

The difference is like driving every day in a basic sedan, and then suddenly being handed the keys to a well built luxury car. It shows you all the little things that you didn’t realize could be done so much better. And while in the end you may not technically need those things, I dare say that most people would choose to have them.

The Droid Pro delivers a solid business-oriented device that also makes plenty of room for recreational use. I’m sold.

Pros:

• Great hardware specs
• Sleek, easy-to-use design
• Excellent operating system

Cons:

• Can eat battery power quickly
• Some buttons too easy to push

BUILD & DESIGN:

This model looks like many similar smartphones on the market today, with a large screen that dominates the device and minimal buttons. The corners are nicely rounded, and the case is made entirely of black plastic aside from the chrome band running around the edges of the phone, on top of the keyboard slider.

The keyboard is accessed by pushing the display to the right, and that mechanism is solid and strong–you won’t have to worry about the slide stopping in the middle.

Overall size is similar to most modern phones. The Transform measures 4.6-inches tall and 2.42-inches wide, just slightly larger than the iPhone. Thickness is a different matter; the Transform is significantly thicker due to the physical keyboard. It’s heavier too, at 5.4 ounces.

It fits nicely into a pocket, but you probably won’t forget that it’s there. It isn’t too large or bulky, just not as slender and light as other phones.

Display
The 3.5-inch HVGA  (320 x 240)  touchscreen is very good, but it isn’t amazing. There are larger, higher-resolution screens out there, but these are generally on more expensive phones, of course. I did find that the display has good color saturation, good clarity and contrast, and minimal pixelation when examined up close.

The display is responsive to my touch; I didn’t have the dreaded “tap here, get no response, tap again and again, harder each time” problem with the Transform. There were also no issues with a jumpy cursor or a too responsive display either.

Keyboard
The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is really nice, one of the best I’ve used in recent memory. The keys are very large, taking up as much space as possible, so I didn’t have any problem hitting the wrong key. They are also very flat and in essence flush with the surrounding area; there is only a slight bump on the two home keys. I still get good tactile feedback; pressing each key gives a small click and you know when you’ve depressed the key enough for it to register.

The key layout is quite nice, with no funky or strange placements. The Backspace, Enter, and OK buttons are on the right side, and the arrow keys are grouped on the bottom right side of the keyboard. Punctuation and numbers are accessed by first pressing the orange function key on the lower left corner of the keyboard. You will also find a smiley-faced emoticon key, symbol key, and the @ sign just to the left of the space bar, while the control key is between the space bar and the arrow keys.

The graphics on the keys are very large and easy to see in daylight and when illuminated in white for use in the dark. Though I would have liked Samsung to use a color other than pale orange to label the numbers and punctuation for better readability, I didn’t have too much trouble finding the right mark, especially with a little practice.

Other Buttons & Controls
The power button is on the top right side of the device, with the voice dial button below. The camera button is on the bottom right side, and the volume up/down buttons are on the top left side of the phone.

The microSD card slot is on the bottom left side, but is hidden under the back cover of the phone. Thankfully the back cover is easy to remove, and the card slot is not under the battery, so it isn’t too difficult to swap out if necessary.

The headphone jack and the charge/sync port are on the top of the phone, and the charge/sync port is covered by a very nice little sliding door as opposed to the standard rubber plug or open port. The placement is very strange if you’re trying to use the phone while it is plugged in; my natural instinct was to pick up the phone with the cord hanging from the bottom, not the top. There’s nothing wrong with that, I just prefer that type of thing to be on the bottom edge of the phone instead of the top.

PERFORMANCE:

The Samsung Transform is based on an 800 MHz processor, and debuted running Google’s Android OS 2.1 — an upgrade to version 2.2 is scheduled to be out later this year.

Given its processor speed, this device isn’t going to win any races, but it does perform well. I didn’t experience any major slowdowns, and apps loaded within just a few seconds.

One of the coolest features is Sprint ID, which offers a fast and easy way to customize your phone. I’ll be covering it in far greater detail in a separate article here on Brighthand.

Wireless/Call Quality
The Transform has excellent sound quality, and my test callers were impressed. Even when I was walking down a busy street they didn’t hear any background noise, and both sides of the conversation came through loud and clear.

Signal strength is also quite good, even inside my office, which is typically a dead zone for cellular service no matter the carrier. I had no problem at all making and receiving calls, which was a pleasant surprise.

As a mid-range model, this smartphone comes with 3G cellular-wireless networking, Wi-Fi b/g, and Stereo Bluetooth.

Productivity
You will get the standard Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts, plus an alarm clock, calculator, Express News (from Handmark) and the web browser.

Express News helps you stay on top of the latest stories and headlines; it isn’t an RSS reader but I found it to be both user friendly and fast. It serves up top stories with one photo each, so you can catch up very quickly–much better than navigating the much busier news site.

The web browsing experience on the Samsung smartphone is good, but not stellar because it’s somewhat slow. I waited quite a while to load the main page in  several  sites while I was browsing at home and at the office. That rules out a coverage issue, so I suspect that the processor in the Transform is not quite as speedy/powerful as I would like.

The Google Maps Navigation beta is quite nice though, and I really enjoyed using it. You can choose your destination from your contact list, or you can speak it or type it. Directions pop up very fast, and you can choose to add additional layers such as traffic information, gas stations, and the like. You can also choose whether you want to avoid highways or avoid tolls as well. I’m very impressed and can say that this is just about the best navigation experience I’ve had on a smartphone so far. Carrier-sponsored navigation services tend to be kludgey and slow, but this one is powerful, quick, easy to use, and isn’t cluttered up with unnecessary features.

If you’re planning to use the Transform for business, you’ll probably want to add an app for working with Microsoft Office files. This is a situation where the Android market comes in handy. You’ll be able to search for the app you want, purchase it, and download it, right on the device.

Entertainment
Just as in the previous section, there aren’t too many entertainment apps preloaded on the Transform. That’s due partly to SprintID, of course, but it’s also nice not to have bunch of preloaded stuff that you may not want. Aside from the apps that were added as part of the SprintID I chose at startup, Pandora and YouTube were the only ones that were included when I unboxed the phone.

The Pandora streaming music service works perfectly, though I was rather underwhelmed by the external speaker. It’s loud enough, but the sound is rather tinny, no bass at all. The Black-Eyed Peas, normally a groovin’ music experience that usually makes me want to get up and dance, sounded rather flat. The experience is better with headphones, but still not great.

YouTube also works fine, though the video quality was somewhat disappointing — rather grainy, with no option to watch in full screen mode.

Like all Android OS devices, the Transform comes with a multimedia player. You can store your music and video files on a microSD card, but you’re going to need to supply your own.

Camera
The 3.2 megapixel camera is capable of producing some very nice shots under the right conditions — outdoors in bright light, for example. Depending on the situation there are some exposure issues and blown out areas; photos of the dawn sky exhibit a great deal of noise and loss of color differentiation.

The zoom feature isn’t great; under ideal conditions you might get a good shot out of it. Generally speaking you’ll want to just move yourself closer to the action.

The camera is also rather slow to capture a photo, which means that until I realized what was happening, I would actually move the phone before the photo was actually captured, ruining the shot. Results aren’t terrible by any means, but the camera is a disappointment considering that the Transform has so many other good features.

The Transform also comes with a front-facing video camera, so it can do video chatting. In theory, anyway — it isn’t bundled with any software to enable this feature.

Battery Life
I’m impressed by the battery life on this device. I expect that the typical Android phone will go dead very quickly the first day I have it, due to syncing all of the information from my Google account, downloading a bunch of software from the Android Market, and starting to give the phone a really good workout for review purposes. Not this time.

The Transform surprised me by lasting almost four days on the initial charge, which has to be a new personal record for me. I can also get as many as five days of use out of before it goes dead, though if I take a ton of photos that drops down to two or three days.

CONCLUSION:

I like the Samsung Transform. I think it’s a good solid phone with a great keyboard, great sound quality, and very good battery life.

This device has a good screen and is responsive enough, but it falls short in the entertainment area, specifically with grainy video quality, an underwhelming external speaker, and a weak camera with poor quality zoom.

Its current price of $150 after rebate is slightly high, but not too bad.

The Transform is a good choice for someone who is more phone-centric, who talks (and texts) a lot, and needs excellent voice quality and a great keyboard. If you want a media powerhouse, though, the Transform probably isn’t the device for you.

Pros

• Excellent call quality
• Very good battery life
• Excellent keyboard
• Google Maps Navigation is solid and a pleasure to use

Cons

• Somewhat thicker and heavier than comparable phones
• Barely adequate camera with poor quality zoom
• Underwhelming external speaker
• No bundled microSD memory card

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