Review: Kyocera Zio
Camera
The Zio uses the stock Android camera software. It can be opened via a home screen short cut or the dedicated button. In my experience, using the on-screen software button was faster than the dedicated hardware button, but only by a smidge. Either way, you're looking at at least 3 seconds for the camera to prepare itself.
The viewfinder offers a zoom bar for adjusting zoom, a software shutter button, and a software sliding switch to flip between the still camera and video camera. Using the menu key opens up the full settings menu, and it's fairly extensive. Users can adjust resolution, quality, focus mode, effects, white balance and so on. Everything is set to "auto" by default. Once you've made your selections, press the back key or the camera key to get back to the viewfinder.
When you're ready to take a shot, press the camera button half-way to focus, and all the way down to snap the picture. As I mentioned earlier, the delicate sensibilities of the Zio's camera key means you'll have to practice a bit to keep from overriding the autofocus.
The camera takes about 1 second to focus, and then another second to snap the shot and bring up the preview screen. From the preview screen, images can be saved, deleted or sent to others via email or MMS. If you want to add a picture-sharing service, you'll have to do so through the Android Market.
Gallery
As for the gallery, you can jump there from the camera or the main menu. The gallery view consists of a grid of thumbnails. With a picture highlighted, you can use the menu button to get at a few options, but it's easier to press and hold, which opens up a larger menu for making changes to the picture.
Pictures can be cropped and rotated, but that's about it. No advanced editing functions here. You can easily add pictures to emails, create MMS messages, set images as wallpapers and so on. It would have been nice to see Sanyo and Cricket take some initiative and do something a little different with the gallery, but it's the same old Android gallery.
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Sanyo Zio by Kyocera
