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Review: LG Fathom

Form Basics Extras Wrap-Up Comments 6

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Camera

If the LG Fathom had a touchscreen that actually worked properly, the camera interface would be pretty good. It looks good. There are on-screen controls to manage brightness, macro mode and other settings. The full settings menu resembles a rotating dial like you'd find on a real camera, and you get some nice options, like ISO control or a panorama mode, among a few others. Unfortunately, a bad touchscreen kills the experience. The buttons rarely respond as they should. The rotary dial jumps around and moves back and forth through the settings because it can't understand finger input. Am I really supposed to break out the stylus just to use the camera?

At least the camera has a nice button. The two-stage trigger makes it easy to find the halfway spot for auto focus, then click the rest of the way to snap a picture. The camera also opens quickly, but I couldn't start shooting right away. First I had to read the message about screen ratios. I clicked the "Don't show me this message again" box, but the joke was on me, because the check mark disappeared as soon as I lifted your finger. I had to acknowledge the message every time.

Image Gallery

The image gallery is basic, but the touchscreen didn't get in the way or give me any trouble, which is a rarity on this phone. It was easy to enlarge pics and flick through images in an album. There is a slideshow mode to display pics, and images looked good on the Fathom's screen. You can zoom in, but finding the controls requires a jump into the menus, and when the zoom buttons show up on screen, they are laughably small. I needed a zoom to find the zoom buttons, and a stylus to press them.

There are some limited editing options for photos. You can crop or rotate pics, and there is even an enigmatic auto correct feature. Auto correct didn't seem to do much, but it did improve lighting and dynamic range just a little bit.

You can send photos from the gallery, but only with email or MMS. You cannot upload photos to Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites directly from the image gallery. The phone is unaffiliated with popular online photo repositories like PhotoBucket, Picasa or Flickr. Welcome back to 2006, Microsoft.

Next page: Image Quality

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LG Fathom

3.2" display 480 x 800 pixels
Snapdragon S1 QSD8650 processor
1,500 mAh battery
Memory Card Slot, Hardware Text Keyboard, Headphone Jack (3.5mm)

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