Samsung's SCH-u900 FlipShot for Verizon is the carrier's best camera phone, but that's not saying as much as it should. While the FlipShot's 3-megapixel camera offers better picture quality than any other Verizon camera phone, it still suffers from picture-quality flaws that plague the entire phone market.

The u900 is a fairly large (3.9 by 1.7 by 0.7 inches; 3.9 ounces) yet comfortable flip phone with rounded edges. On the outside, there's a dim 1.2-inch 128-by-96-pixel LCD that shows an analog clock, and some invisible, touch-sensitive music control buttons. Flip the phone open to find a large, bright, 2.2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen and a keypad with keys that are flat but large enough and well separated. The phone's 3-megapixel camera lens is on the back, and there's no lens cover. The microSD card slot is under the back cover, but you don't have to remove the battery to change cards.

The FlipShot's marquee feature, of course, is its camera. To use it, you swivel the screen and flip it back so you're holding the phone just as you would a digital camera: The big screen inside the phone becomes the viewfinder. The camera takes 3MP shots at 2,048-by-1,536 resolution and has real autofocus, but no optical zoom. Notable features include manual ISO up to 400 and a macro mode.

But the FlipShot has the same problems as every other camera phone—and for these hybrids to be taken seriously as digital cameras, they need to get past these hurdles. The flash, though good for a camera phone, is pathetic for an actual camera. That's understandable, given the huge battery draw of a real flash. But nothing excuses the 1.8-second shutter delay caused by the autofocus (which can be cut down to a more reasonable 0.3 seconds if you turn the feature off). In addition, I had persistent focus problems with indoor shots (though the autofocus does help there). Exposure judgments were off, too: In an outdoor shot against a bright sky, the FlipShot both overexposed the sky and underexposed the foreground. What's more, fringing was visible around the edges of objects, and white lines were sometimes cloudy with stray pixels.

The camcorder mode records 320-by-240 videos at 15 frames per second, but footage is troubled by a visual pulsing common in camera-phone video modes. You can save your photos and videos on microSD cards, and both a Kingston 4GB and SanDisk 8GB card worked fine. You can download your photos using a USB cable (not included) and the phone's built-in mass storage drivers, or you can just put your microSD card into a card reader on your PC. There's also 56MB of usable memory on board.

All of my criticisms hold true for pretty much every camera phone I've seen. Aside from its camera functions, the FlipShot is a fine, high-end feature phone. Reception and earpiece volume are both very good, though speakerphone volume could be louder. Voices tend to sound just a touch muddled, but that's nothing serious. Transmissions sounded fine on the other end, and noise exclusion was good. The FlipShot has a 2.5mm jack for wired headsets and auto-pairs with most Bluetooth headsets, including the Plantronics Pulsar 590. You can trigger the excellent Nuance VoiceSignal voice dialing using a handset button or your Bluetooth headset. The battery life of 4 hours and 18 minutes was fine for a multimedia-focused Verizon phone.

The standard upscale Verizon features work well here. The MP3/WMA (but not AAC) music player sounds fine over wired or Bluetooth headphones and plays loudly, if tinnily, over the built-in speaker. The FlipShot plays 3D games, runs Verizon's VZ Navigator GPS software, and lets you download both basic POP3 e-mail and AIM/MSN/Yahoo Instant messaging clients for the phone. The Access NetFront Web browser is a pleasant surprise: It can't render complex pages well, but at least it tries to show real Web pages as opposed to being stuck in the WAP-only wasteland that most Verizon phones languish in.

The FlipShot can also serve as a laptop modem, though I wasn't able to test that feature because it wasn't activated on my test unit. Bluetooth worked fine for printing photos, but I couldn't get Bluetooth file transfer functions to work with my Mac or PC. I might as well also mention the curious business-card scanning mode, which will scan a card and save it as a contact. Unfortunately, it didn't read business cards accurately enough to be useful to me.

I'm still waiting for the camera-centric phone that can genuinely replace a digital camera. The Nokia N95 (U.S.) comes close, and word has it that Sony Ericsson has some contenders on the way. Until then, the u900 is as good as a camera phone gets on Verizon. But I'd recommend buying a less-expensive phone and a dedicated digital camera instead.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 18 minutes

Compare the Samsung SCH-u900 FlipShot with several other mobile phones side by side.

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