3. Using The LG VX5200 Camera Phone

The VX5200 supports image resolutions of 640x480, 320x240, and 160x120. Go small, and you can take up to 200 shots, which are quite good for a camera phone. I was most impressed with outdoor shots in daylight, but indoor and darker shots worked well, too. Indoor shots tend be a bit dark, so play with the camera's effects or send the JPEGs to yourself for doctoring on your PC with your favorite image editor. The camera phone's 2x digital zoom button inexplicably washed out the subject and produced heavily aliased (jagged) edges in my test photos.

The VX5200 has two buttons for taking pictures: the OK button on the inside, for use when the unit is open, and one on the side - the Camera button - for when it is closed. The side camera button only works when the camera is closed. You can choose between two digital shutter sounds, or silence.

There are service bundles that people can add to their phone package with unlimited calls to other Verizon customers ("In" calling) from the "America's Choice Coverage Area." One is unlimited TXT, PIX and FLIX messaging among the same group, plus 50 messages outside the Verizon group. The cost is $5 a month. (Note that the VX5200 doesn't shoot videos (FLIX).) Show your TXT and PIX to 250 people outside the network for $10 a month, and 500 for $15. You can enhance your camera shots at Pix Place on the Verizon site, and send them to anyone free directly from that site.

This camera can send a picture to many people at once, but would be exponentially more useful if it could send many pictures at once to a user. That would save tons of menuing time, even though just one round isn't bad. As it is now, the user has to go into the camera area, select each picture, indicate they want to send it, indicate to whom, even if it's to the same person, wait for the photo to send, and start over. Those who care enough about pictures to buy a camera phone would like to select multiple pictures and send them home quickly, where they could handle them with their normal image manipulation and e-mailing tools.

Verizon tech support says none of the phones they offer has that ability. My guess is that one reason has to do with income and profit. It is difficult to see how a wireless service could charge for sending each picture if a subscriber could send more than one picture in a message, no matter how convenient, whether the recipient is "in" or out. That is too bad.