Review: Pantech Crux
The camera software offers most of the same features as on other Verizon handsets, but the Crux has repackaged them for the touch screen. Pressing the dedicated camera key (if you can find it) will launch the camera in about 2 seconds. The main viewfinder offers on-screen controls for brightness only. Press the little image of a cog wheel, and the full settings menu jumps open. Here, it is easy to adjust the capture mode, white balance, timer, resolution, effects, and so on. While the software buttons to make these adjustments are all easy to work with, scrolling the menu screen up and down is a little laggy.
There are no on-screen controls to release the shutter. The only way to take a picture is to press the camera button. Since the Crux doesn't have autofocus, pictures are snapped almost instantly, though it takes several seconds for them to be saved to the card. The Crux does not provide a preview of images you've taken. Rather, it saves them and jumps right back to the viewfinder screen.
It's not the most robust camera software, but it covers most of the basics.
Gallery
The Crux's gallery is disappointing in its limitations. On a high level, it behaves mostly like Verizon's other feature phones (sensing a theme here?). It's a basic grid, and when in grid view, users can select images to move them around or delete them in bulk. Pressing an image opens up the image viewer. Since this is a touch phone, you expect to be able to swipe from one image to the next. Nope. Rather, you have to press two little arrow keys next to each image to advance to the next one or return to the previous. That's counterintuitive. Further, if you accidentally press the image itself, and not the little arrow, it opens a full screen view of the image where the only thing you can do is launch a slide show. The slideshow advances automatically, and doesn't allow you to interact with the photos at all. You can only sit there and watch. (Did anyone use this software before it shipped?)
The gallery is also missing any sort of editing features. Photos can be sent via MMS or Bluetooth, but not via email, nor via social network. Users can choose to send images to a Verizon online image service, but it's no Picasa or Flickr, nor Facebook.
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Pantech Crux
