Does the myTouch 4G Slide have the most advanced camera in a phone?

It was about 10 days ago that I took a quick look at the T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide and since T-Mobile advertises the device as the "most advanced camera of any smartphone" I figured I needed to take it out for a real life trial. T-Mobile is making a bold claim here when you have smartphones like the Nokia N8 on the market so I captured some photos from both of these devices and posted them in an image gallery.

I think the myTouch 4G Slide is the best HTC camera phone available and I thoroughly enjoyed the capture and sharing experience over the past several days. It looks like the Nokia N8 is still the champ when it comes to the highest image quality on a phone, but that isn't a device that many people find meets their other needs.

	Image Gallery: Photos taken with the new myTouch 4G Slide and some from a Nokia N8.

Camera hardware

The myTouch 4G Slide has a backside illuminated sensor and wide aperture lens (f/2.2) to go along with some advance software. The physical camera button is well designed and well positioned for easy photo capturing. You can also tap the capture button on the display if you don't want to use the physical camera button. The software works with the hardware to create a near instantaneous capture experience.

Camera software

The myTouch 4G Slide has some of the best camera software I have seen on a phone and HTC makes it very easy to capture photos in various advanced modes, including panorama, HDR, burst mode, macro, and other effects. Take a look at the various video walkthroughs of these camera softer features on the T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide website.

• SweepShot Panorama: I like having the ability to capture photos in panorama mode on my camera phone since I enjoy capture these types of photos at the Sounders game and in other locations. While the MT4G Slide supports this out of the box with SweepShot Panorama software, I had some trouble capturing these shots as the software requires you to press the capture button and sweep at a good steady pace until you reach the end of the frame. Sometimes I moved too fast and an entire section of my picture was skipped over and at other times I didn't move fast enough and a panorama shot was not captured. It takes some practice and not every picture turns out, but I though the ones that did looked pretty good. I am used to matching up frame with some of the overlapping one before so this sweeping method is pretty slick.
• ClearShot HDR: The high dynamic range software lets you capture objects in bright settings to turn out a photo that provides an image with more detail. For example, when you capture an image with the sun at your subject's back you often end up with dark shadows and lack of detail for the subject. As you can see in my image gallery a few of these HDR photos look good, but you have to make sure that the objects stay perfectly still when capturing them or you will get ghosting and missing features in the image that is captured. I thought it was great to capture more detail, but after comparing to the Nokia N8 I would rather have a higher quality photo with some missing detail.
• BurstShot: The BurstShot mode lets you initiate a session and have the camera capture several photos in a quick burst. As you can see in my image gallery this mode works well for capturing activities like corner kicks and turned out decent shots.
• Night mode: Night mode is used to capture images in low light situations. You will also find that auto mode switches into night mode when the MT4G Slide detects this lighting condition.
• Action mode: This mode is used to capture objects that are fast moving.
• Macro mode: Macro mode lets you capture images up close and from what I saw images end up great.
• Portrait mode: In this mode you capture people in focus while the background is blurry. This is a fun mode for giving you some different effects when you want to capture people.
• Manual mode: You can completely control the camera capture settings in manual mode. There are several different effects available, such as distortion, vignette, dots, vintage, and many more. You can also control the sharpness, saturation, contrast, exposure, white balance, ISO, and resolution.

The nine different scene modes, auto is the first option, are easy to activate simply by tapping the top left icon and selecting the mode you wish to use.

I couldn't find any flash setting for red eye though and wonder if that can be added in a future software update or if I was just completely missing out on something.

Can the myTouch 4G Slide replace your camera?

The T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide is a very solid Android device with some of the highest specifications and latest Android OS in one package. It is the best HTC camera phone I have used and I could honestly get by with using it as my main device. However, since I have a Nokia N8 with a fantastic camera I personally won't be buying a myTouch 4G Slide for the camera alone. I know many people do not like Symbian and Nokia does have its issues so the myTouch 4G Slide may be just perfect for most people looking for a good camera phone.

The ability to easily upload images to Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and more is a great feature of the Android platform and most of the images I captured from my daddy-daughter weekend were with the myTouch 4G Slide and it performed well enough that I would take it with me as my phone and camera in one. I am very tempted by the myTouch 4G Slide and may not be able to resist picking one up for too long.