Review: Samsung Strive
Camera
The Strive's camera offers 2 megapixels of mediocrity. It's launched via the dedicated camera button on the side. The camera controls are shown only in the landscape orientation, so if you have the phone open when you launch the camera, you need to turn it on its side. At least it launches almost instantly.
The controls of the Strive's camera are easy enough to figure out. At the top of the display the Strive offers a snapshot of the camera's current settings, such as resolution, white balance, timer, etc. Pressing the menu key lets you interact with those little icons. As you scroll past each icon, a drop-down menu shows what options exist for that particular feature. I found this to be fairly good at letting you make quick adjustments to the Strive. The d-pad can be used to zoom (when not set to full resolution) or adjust the brightness level.
The Strive takes about 1 second to capture an image, and then another 2 seconds to process/save the image. The preview screen lets you send, save, or delete the image.
The camera is bare-bones, as is the video recorder, which uses the exact same controls.
Gallery
The gallery can be opened from the camera itself, but it's super annoying. The gallery app has been built into the “MyStuff” folder, and switches to portrait orientation. I don't like being forced to rotate the phone every time I want to take a quick look at my pictures.
On top of that, the gallery app itself is just horrid. Photos are segregated between the phone and the memory card, which means they aren't all in one place or one gallery. The gallery app is slow, takes forever to load images, and only offers a list-view. No nice grids, no fancy animations, no fun!
You can, however, perform a ridiculous number of editing tasks. You can rotate, crop, zoom, flip, as well as adjust brightness, color and contrast.
If you want to send your images anywhere, you have to click through about a million menus to get the task done. My thumb hurt after a while from pressing the d-pad so many times.
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Samsung Strive A687
