Review: Samsung UpStage
As we said previously, you can launch the camera with a press of the dedicated key, which for some reason is on the phone side of UpStage. You can also navigate directly to the camera application from the media side menus. The camera takes about 2 seconds to start up, and is ready to snap pictures with a press of the center select key.
The camera is oriented so that you hold the UpStage vertically like a phone, not horizontally like a camera. The only problem is that in order to press the select button to snap a picture, your thumb must cross either the back or end keys on the touch sensitive navigation pad. No matter how careful we were, we'd accidentally hit one of these keys once in about every four times, sending us back to the menus and causing us to lose a number of pictures. The only way we could consistently prevent this from happening was to hold the UpStage two hands - one at the top and a second down at the navigation pad.
The camera is a rather simple 1.3 Megapixel unit with a night mode, but no flash. There is an icon driven on-screen menu to control the options from within the viewfinder instead of having to go to an options screen.
After you snap a picture, it takes about 5 seconds to save and then display the review screen. A quick press of the back button will immediately return you to the viewfinder.
The gallery presents a typical grid of nine thumbnails with options to share or manage selected photos. These same options are available in single-picture view. Expanding a single photo displays it letter-boxed in the screen instead of turning it 90 degrees to display it full screen. There is no full screen or zoom option.
Preview: Samsung UpStage
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Samsung UpStage M620
