Marvelous Memoir

My favorite of the bunch is the 8-megapixel Samsung Memoir, which packs an impressive set of camera and phone functions into a slick package.

The Memoir (US$200 from T-Mobile with a two-year contract and mail-in rebate, but available for $50 from Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) with a contract) sports a crisp touchscreen that is helpful for accessing the camera's numerous features. Those include mosaic and panorama shooting modes, as well as a feature that can warn you when one of your photo subjects blinked in a picture.

Taking photos is simple with the dedicated capture and zoom buttons on one side. The Memoir's flash can handle darker scenes fairly well, too.

The Memoir's built-in editing options let you crop photos, adjust colors or white balance, insert various effects and more. If you forgot to take a certain shot in black and white, no problem -- you can adjust it after the fact.

The Memoir has its weak points. It snaps photos slower than another contender I tried, the Palm (Nasdaq: PALM) Pre. And like most of the phones I tested, it lacks optical zoom, which gives more detailed images and lets you shoot from farther away. The Memoir uses a digital "zoom" that simply crops and magnifies what you see on the screen to give the appearance of moving in closer.

I often felt the touch screen wasn't that responsive, or at least wasn't doing what I expected it would when I tapped it. It would have been nice if the phone came with more storage space than just a 1 gigabyte memory card, too. Here's a look at some other camera phones.