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The Lotus has a 2 megapixel camera that takes good pictures. Same as the music player, you can open it with the phone closed. Since both the viewfinder and lens face in the same direction, using the camera with the Lotus closed is really only going to work for self-portraits. (Sort of fits into the vain nature of the phone, don't ya think?) You can snap pictures, but that's about it.

Opening up the Lotus gives you a lot more options. The large display lends itself well to picture taking. Images are taken as they appear in the display, which is in the landscape orientation. The external display shows an icon of a camera, so those you're pointing the Lotus at know you have the camera running.

The options include the usual crop of settings controls, such as the resolution, brightness, white balance, and so on. Once you've configured how you want the camera to work, pressing the D-pad captures images in just under a second. The Lotus takes perhaps another second to save the image and you're ready to take another picture. Because the Lotus doesn't have auto-focus, the picture-taking process is fairly speedy.

The gallery application opens up to show a large grid of thumbnails. One thing I found frustrating was that if you select a picture and click on the D-pad, the images don't automatically open. Instead, you've placed a check mark next to the photo. You have to press the left soft key to actually open the image. As you move the selector over each thumbnail, the image expands slightly so you can get a better look at the image before opening it. Once you've opened an image, pressing the D-pad left or right will cycle through your images.

The right soft key offers a wide range of options for moving, editing or uploading the picture. These same options are available with the image open. If you subscribe to a picture sharing service such as Flickr, it is easy to set up the phone to upload pictures there.

The video recorder works exactly as the camera does. Before recording each video, you have to choose if you want to record a 20-second snippet for MMS messages, or a longer video. It warns you that videos larger than 512Kb can't be uploaded from the phone over the air to any Web services.

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