Back in October of 2004 it was time to buy a new cell phone. Being the geek and sometime photographer that I am, I wanted to get the best quality camera phone that I could from my carrier (Verizon). The highest resolution camera they had was the Motorola V170 that took 1.2 megapixel photos! Wow, I was impressed and thought this will be good to carry around and snap decent quick photos and hopefully work well when I go to concerts.

Well, unfortunately this phone falls short on delivering my goals. When I took photos at the Verizon store they looked good of course because I could only see them on the small screen on the phone. Once I got the photos off of the camera (unfortunately past the time Verizon would let me take the phone back), I found out that none of the photos were good enough to keep.

Okay, I admit, I am a little picky, but you be the judge. Below is a picture I took about a week ago of the building where I work. As you can see, the building wall is completely washed out, the colors are horrible and it does not even seem to be in focus. Recently I was at a concert trying to take pictures (about 10 feet from the stage) and none came out at all. I was standing next to this guy with a "normal" camera phone and his were coming out great :-( My sons "normal" phone takes better pictures than this phone… okay they are smaller resolution but the exposure is a lot better and they are not fuzzy.

I recently took the phone into Verizon and they did a major software upgrade to it. I have noticed that the camera tries harder to adjust the exposure, but as you can see if still falls way short. So now I'm left with this phone that takes horrible pictures, is much larger than most cell phones and much heavier too. So my advice to wait until something better comes along if you want higher picture resolution.