Camera Phone Reviews

Helio Drift

Helio Drift Reviews

CNET reviews the Helio Drift and writes about the phone's camera: "The Drift comes with a 2-megapixel camera with an array of settings, including image resolution (1600x200, 1280x960, 800x600, 640x480, 320x240, 240x240), quality (fine, normal), white balance (auto, daylight, cloudy, incandescent, and fluorescent), lighting (normal, spotlight), color effects, photo frames, a self timer, and a flash. There are also a few settings for the video camera, including resolution (320x240, 176x144), rate of frames per second (14fps, 7fps), white balance, lighting adjustment, a mute control, and color effects. You can also adjust shutter sound, block calls when in camera mode, and choose the location of the saved media. The Drift comes with 128MB memory or you can use a microSD card, though a card doesn't come with the phone. We were very impressed with the quality of the photos, though not so much by the low-resolution videos."

PCMag reviews the Samsung Drift and writes about the phone's camera: "During my real-world testing, pictures taken with the Drift's 2-megapixel camera were beautifully sharp, but a bit dark. The video mode takes 320-by-240 videos at 14 frames per second, good for a camera phone. ... There's also a weird bug in the camera that doesn't let you send picture messages if the image is stored on the memory card. Helio's intercarrier messaging has always been a little wonky, anyway. For example, when I tried to send pictures to and from a Verizon Wireless phone, the Helio message arrived on the Verizon phone, but the Verizon message never showed up on the Helio phone. (Text messages worked fine.)"

MobileBurn reviews the Helio Drift and writes about the phone's camera: "Like the other two Helio offerings, the Pantech Hero and the VK Mobile KickFlip, the Samsung Drift has a 2 megapixel camera. Sadly, the camera quality seems to be pretty poor. The overall focus is very soft, and the camera has no ability to photograph anything closer than a few feet away. On top of that, it has a very tough time dealing with high contrast situations and many situations that involve daylight. Occasionally you can get a nice photo out of it, but that is the exception rather than the rule. The camera's user interface is really quite nice, but that just can't save it."

InfoSync reviews the Helio Drift and writes, "Working with photos on the Drift can be entertaining. First and foremost, by sending your pictures as a message to UP (87 on the keypad), Helio will store your photos for uploading to MySpace. Image editing on the Drift is robust, with fun frames, filters and cropping options, as well as stickers, tiny graphics you can create and slap on your photos, and text overlays to add captions and cartoon bubbles. The Drift can send photos easily via MMS and Bluetooth and can print to USB and Bluetooth printers. With all these options, we're disappointed that Samsung built such a poor quality lens on the camera. Our snapshots looked blurry even on the camera's small screen; blown up to full 2-megapixel resolution, they looked fuzzy, pixilated, and overexposed, even while our white balance was set to Auto."