T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide Review: Best Phone Camera Ever

Earlier this month, T-Mobile announced the latest addition to its MyTouch family, the myTouch 4G Slide ($200 with a two-year contract, as of July 15, 2011). The specs look pretty standard for this summer's slew of high-end smartphones: 4G connectivity, a 3.7-inch Super LCD screen, Android 2.3 and a dual-core processor. All of this is great and everything, but what really caught my eye were the camera's specs. In fact, T-Mobile claims that the Slide has the most advanced camera of any smartphone available. So how does the Slide hold up as both a phone and a camera? Read on to find out.

Slider Design

As the name implies, the HTC-built MyTouch 4G Slide has a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard in addition to a 3.7-inch WVGA super LCD touchscreen. For a slider phone, I was surprised with how thin the Slide is at only 0.54 inches thick. For comparison, the keyboard-less myTouch 4G is 0.43 inches thick. It weighs a manageable 6.5 ounces.

The keyboard's keys are nicely spaced and large enough, but unfortunately they are a bit too flat for my liking. I found myself using Swype on the touch keyboard more than the physical keyboard.

The Slide has an 8-megapixel camera and an HD camcorder that can shoot video in up to 1080p. It also has an array of advanced features. As phones beat editor, my camera knowledge is pretty basic, so I went to our cameras beat editor, Tim Moynihan, to decipher some of these specs and features for me.

The Slide supposedly has zero shutter lag, which sounds good on paper, but it is something we definitely needed to put to the test. According to Tim, the autofocus system has to be pretty fast in order to capture non-blurry images without any delay. Looks like T-Mobile's claims are true; the Slide's camera was perfectly snappy and smoothly handled every subject we threw at it.

The camera has a backside illuminated sensor, which is fairly standard in the most recent crop of point and shoot cameras these days, which works well for low-light situations without need for a flash. The Slide's F2.2 lens is a wider aperture than many recent cameras, which also translates to better low-light shooting without the flash.

The SweepShot mode is similar to Sony's Sweep Panorama mode, which is very cool. You press the shutter and move the camera from right-to-left, and the camera stitches together a panoramic image instantly. This mode is incredibly fun to play with and the photos look pretty good (see example) though sometimes they don't stitch up accurately.