Review: Samsung Flight II
Camera
The camera on the Samsung Flight II opens quickly with a press of the camera button. The camera was very responsive. Shoot a picture and you get a chance to review it. Press the camera button again and you're back to the viewfinder in a flash. From the review screen, you can send photos via picture message, via bluetooth, or to AT&T's Online Locker service, which charges a fee for every picture uploaded, or you can subscribe to the service for a monthly fee. You can't upload pics to Facebook or Twitter from here, which is a shame.
The camera also has a nice selection of settings. Perhaps Samsung went overboard, considering the camera is a fairly low-quality, 2-megapixel shooter. The panorama mode is nice, and the mosaic stitching can produce some interesting results. But do we really need to choose between matrix and spot metering on this device? Neither seemed to improve the quality of my images, so my answer is no. But if you like having plenty of control over your images, the Flight II does have white balance adjustment and exposure controls. There is even a Smile Shot mode, but the camera didn't once take a picture of any of my smiling subjects. It simply ignored them until I changed modes. There is no flash on the Flight II, so you'll want to limit your shooting to brightly lit spots.
Image Gallery
The image gallery on the Samsung Flight II did a fine job displaying my pics, when the phone's other problems didn't stand in the way. You can view photos as a list of filenames or as a grid of thumbnails. Tapping on a picture lets you view it full screen. There is some sort of zooming function tied to a gymnastic finger gesture, but I could never get the zoom to work properly, even though I've used it on Samsung TouchWIZ phones in the past (in other words, it wasn't my fault, the feature didn't work). Viewing images full screen, you can swipe left or right to move through your photo gallery, but this swiping gesture did not always work. Sometimes I had to swipe a few times before the Flight II would respond.
The phone has a surprising number of editing features, though it does skip some of the basics. You cannot crop or rotate a photo, but you can adjust the contrast, or apply a number of warping filters for silly looking effects. There is an Auto Level function, and this did bring some of the detail in my photos out of the shadows. But it did not help very much. There is even a filter effect to add noise to a photo, which seems redundant since the camera does that on its own.
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Samsung Flight II
