Review: LG Dare
Camera
It's obvious what the Dare's stand-out feature is. The camera software is intuitive, speedy, and lets you adjust what you want to adjust quickly so you can get back to taking pictures. A quick press of the camera button launches the Dare's camera in about 1.5 seconds. It feels fast. The default screen shows you what capture mode you're in, what your focus setting is, what your ISO setting is, and where your photos are being stored (either internal or external memory).
Touch the screen anywhere, and the full camera menus appear. On the left side is a slider to adjust the brightness. Below it is a cog wheel that takes you into the extensive menu for fine-tuning everything about the camera. On the right side of the screen are shortcuts for adjusting the focus mode, the timer, flash and a shortcut to the gallery application.
Some of the fun things about the camera are that you can shoot in panorama mode. It isn't as foolproof as the Motorola ZN5's panorama mode, but it does a good enough job. When taking shots, it shows you the far right edge of the last picture you took, so you can line everything up. The autostitching process takes perhaps 3 seconds. In the end, you wind up with a picture that has a view of about 180 degrees.
You can also perform multi-shot shots (up to 9 of them) in case people aren't smiling exactly when you want them to be. If that still didn't get things right, you can use the SmartPic setting, which does its best to balance the bright and dark areas of a picture (after it was taken) to bring out details. The Dare also has face detection software, so you can make sure the phone focuses on your friends' faces, and not the drink they are holding in their hand while they say, "Woooooooo!"
The one problem with the Dare's camera is the actual shutter release buttion. As with most phones, if you press it for several seconds, it will switch to video capture mode. The problem is, in order to focus a shot before taking it, you have to press and hold the button for about two seconds. If you're not careful, and press it just a bit too much, it will launch the video recorder instead of focusing the camera. It required a lot of practice to get the button to act as it should and autofocus before taking a picture. Speaking of which, focusing takes a solid 2 seconds. Once the image is focused, you can press the button all the way to take the shot. The bummer is, there is yet another 1.5 to 2-second delay before the picture is taken. This means the focusing and picture-taking process can be as lengthy as 6 or 7 seconds. This leaves plenty of time for your subject to get bored and wander off.
The software for the video recorder is nearly identical to that of the camera, and you have most of the same controls. The best part is that you can record video at a high frame rate and then play it back in slow motion. This makes for a lot of fun when shooting video, and should lead to a lot of creative posts on YouTube, I am sure.
Gallery
The gallery app is good. You can get to it from the phone applications or a number of shortcuts in the Dare's menus. The basic gallery page can fit 12 of your images on it in thumbnail form. Touching any of them will open it up. You can then swipe your finger sideways to page through your images. You can also rotate the phone sideways to landscape mode and the images will auto-rotate and fill the entire screen. You can page sideways here, too. In the regular opened view, there are several buttons at the bottom of the screen. The first is a send button for composing MMS messages, and the second is an erase key. You can also hit the options button to get a secondary list of action items, or use the magnifying glass to zoom in. It doesn't take too much to figure the gallery out.
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LG Dare VX-9700
