Review: Apple iPhone, In-Depth

The camera in action

The camera in action

The camera in action

Photos & Camera

The Apple iPhone has a built-in 2 megapixel still camera that takes pretty nice photos in general. It does not have an auto-focus lens, and as such is incapable of close-up photography. For a fixed focus camera, it works pretty well right out of the box though - given a reasonable amount of light.

That's a good thing, since the camera has no settings at all. The user has no ability to choose the photo resolution or set a white balance mode. Nothing. In fact, when an image from the camera is emailed to somebody with the Mail application, the resolution is automatically reduced to VGA (640x480 pixels). You have no control over that, either.

The Camera does automatically adjust to the way the camera is held, though. If you hold the phone horizontally, the photos will be recorded that way. The same goes for shots taken with the phone held vertically. The iPhone's camera does not support video recording at all, which is, again, very strange for a multimedia-centric device.

The Photos application is very clever. It makes browsing photos an absolute joy. Photos are copied to and from the device using iTunes and the photos are organized into the Camera Roll, for photos taken by the iPhone, and the Photo Library, for those imported from elsewhere. Users move around the thumbnail view of the albums with their finger, tapping on a photo to view it. From there the user can flick the screen left or right to go to the previous or next photo. Rotating the iPhone will automatically rotate the display, making it easy to view both portrait and landscape mode photos at their best. The photos can also be viewed easily as a slide show, and the transition effects for the slideshow can be selected in the Photos section of the Settings control panel.

Photo albums

Photo library

Photo viewer

Rotate to view better

View a photo

Drag to next photo

Drag to next photo

See the next photo