So when Samsung says that the Memoir takes 8-megapixel photos, your first question should be: So? If the sensor, lens and circuitry are standard cellphone parts, having a lot of megapixels won’t do anything to improve the picture quality.  Fortunately, the pictures from this phone really are excellent, at least for a phone. Unfortunately, the remainder of the Memoir is only mediocre.  The concept of a phone camera (as opposed to a camera phone) isn’t new. Whereas a camera phone is a cellphone with a tacked-on cheapo camera, a phone camera, like the Memoir, is intended to give equal weight to the camera part.  Like the excellent Motorola/Kodak Motozine ZN5 (also from T-Mobile), the Memoir looks like a cellphone on one side and a digital camera on the other. When you hold the thing horizontally, you find a shutter button under your right index finger, and zoom in/out buttons (which double as the volume keys) under your left index finger.  There’s a real flash (a xenon flash, brighter than LED but not as bright as a real camera’s flash) and a true autofocus mechanism.  On the big, bright touch screen, you can tap icons to access an array of camera controls, many gimmicky and ineffectual: white balance, exposure adjustment, scene modes, ISO (light sensitivity), antishake and so on.  There’s even Smile Shot, meaning the camera waits to take a picture until the subject is smiling (it works) and Blink Shot, meaning the camera doesn’t shoot if the subject’s eyes are closed (doesn’t really work). You can transfer your photos at reduced size to sites like Flickr and Kodak Gallery with a single button tap, or you can e-mail them.  To transfer the full-resolution photos, you can send them to your computer by Bluetooth, put the memory card into a card reader, or connect the U.S.B. cable to your Windows PC (software installation required).  The photos are surprisingly good, especially in bright light. The colors are true, and the detail is about what you’d expect from an inexpensive digital camera.  They are not, as the marketing would have you believe, good enough that you can “leave your digital camera at home”; the Memoir is just too slow for that. It takes four seconds to start up the camera mode, six seconds between shots.  Worse, the shutter lag is something fierce; the camera sometimes waits a good two seconds after you press the shutter button. Moving subjects are almost always blurry. As long as you’re still and so is your subject, you’ll be in good shape — but that rules out many photographic situations.  You should also know that there’s no macro (close-up) mode. Tragically, there’s no zoom, either. Oh, there’s a digital zoom, but that just means “blowing up your picture so the photo quality deteriorates.”  Even so, the camera on the Memoir is almost certainly better than the camera on your current phone. Unfortunately, the phone portion isn’t quite so inspiring.  Ever since the iPhone showed it the way, Samsung has seemed obsessed with touch-screen phones. It has not yet learned the lesson, however, that a touch screen doesn’t gain you anything unless both it and the underlying software are finely tuned and carefully considered. On the Memoir (which runs the same touch software as its predecessor, the Behold), it’s neither.  For example, the whole machine is slow; some of the animations are sluggish and jerky. The screen gives a little buzzy vibration with each finger touch, which is a little gimmicky.  Furthermore, there are at least four places to look for a certain function or program: on the “widgets bar” down the left side of the screen; on the “desktop” (where you can drag about three of your favorite widgets); on the Menu page of programs; in the Applications folder within the Menu page; or inside the Games and Apps folder within that folder. What is this, Windows Mobile?  The Done button sometimes appears at the lower-right of a screen, and other times at the lower-left. Icons on the Widget bar have no text labels, so there’s no way to find out what one is without tapping it — which opens it.  In some programs, turning the phone 90 degrees, so it’s horizontal, produces an on-screen, full qwerty keyboard layout, so typing is easy. But there are no typing shortcuts like the ones on the BlackBerry, Treo and iPhone. So you can’t type “dont” for “don’t,” and hitting the Space bar twice doesn’t produce a period, space and capitalized next letter.  There’s a Web browser on this thing, but you may do a lot of waiting for it; the phone lacks Wi-Fi for fast wireless downloads. It’s capable of accessing T-Mobile’s 3G (meaning high-speed) Internet network, but that’s available only in certain cities.  The bigger problem, though, is that you feel as if you’re looking at the Web through a keyhole. Each Web page appears at full size on the little phone screen, so you’re constantly scrolling around with your finger just to read the end of each sentence. (You can zoom in, but you can’t zoom out from that actual-size starting point.) There’s no multitouch on this phone, so you can’t pinch or spread two fingers to adjust the zoom levels.  The checklist meister at Samsung was certainly working overtime on this baby. It’s got basic e-mail, voice dialing, chat and (for $10 a month) a slowish GPS navigation feature that gives you turn-by-turn driving directions.  There’s simple music playback, but unfortunately, there’s no standard headphone jack, so you can’t replace the Memoir’s hard plastic earbuds with something more comfortable.  The Memoir also has one of the worst manuals ever written — one of those pointless documents with explanations like “ISO: allows you to adjust the ISO sensitivity.” It has no table of contents, and the index is so feeble that it doesn’t even list “e-mail,” “flash” or “memory card.”  As a phone, the Memoir does all right. Sound quality is average and battery life is good (five hours of talk time). Since this is a touch screen, there are no speed-dial keys, although the voice dialing is a consolation. Finally, keep in mind that you’re using the T-Mobile cellular network, which means dead spots in your travels.  Let there be no mistake: the Memoir’s camera produces some of the best photos in cellphone photography today. Unfortunately, the rest of the machine is a mishmash of unevenly executed features, dumped in willy-nilly. And as any chef can tell you, just throwing in every ingredient on your shelf won’t produce a delicious dish.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: It Rings, It Shoots, It Stumbles. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
T-Mobile is introducing the Samsung Memoir, the first 8-megapixel phone camera in the United States. Photos are excellent, but there’s a lot of mediocrity.