Gadgetory

we've taken you on a hardware tour and we've shown you how it stacks up against the Galaxy s3 so the next logical step was to use it as our daily driver for a weekend right I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is Galaxy camera as daily driver a weekend experiment now before you say anything no this wasn't just a stunt we really wanted to find out if the galaxy camera which runs the full version of Android and packs a cellular radio could substitute as a daily driver for some people specifically shutter bugs who don't make a lot of phone calls but do communicate in other ways like via social media and texting it's similar to the question that came up when tablets first became popular could I carry this instead of a phone or in addition to something like a dumb phone is that possible is it workable is it practical with the Galaxy camera in this use case it admittedly wasn't designed for the answer is yes it's possible to use as a daily driver no it's not practical but it's not that far off the mark I took it for a spin as my daily driver for a weekend on 80 here in the Boston area and I came away with these pluses and minuses first things first you can't use the Galaxy camera as a phone in the traditional sense because there's no earpiece and the mic isn't in the right place furthermore there's no phone application in the jellybean build that ships with the camera but you can use the speakerphone to make and take calls and Skype works just fine in that regard with and without video in video calling mode the primary shooter is used as there's no front-facing camera though the camera has a phone number assigned to it it's not possible to make calls to or send texts to the device in the customary way but once again third-party apps like Google Voice work just fine for this purpose and samsung also bundles their own chaton app for messaging of course since this is an Android device you can download nearly any messaging solution you like Facebook Messenger and gtalk performed very well during our time with the camera that's a recurring theme with the galaxy camera if it doesn't come with the functionality you need out of the box you can download it from the Play Store in most instances thanks to its nature is a fully fledged Android device I was able to get my home screens lined up in my preferred order with HD widgets and transit titles games calendars and even Spotify it was a strange but fun experience to blast pin back from my camera this being the 18 T version of the device I was confined to HSPA but data speeds and reception were quite good and of course shots taken with the cameras 16 megapixel sensor outclassed what's possible with most smartphones sugar's having the option to upload directly to Facebook Twitter and Instagram without bothering with finding a Wi-Fi hotspot was really nice nothing new for smartphones course but a convenient novelty on something called a camera unfortunately that comes with some compromises as you might expect this being a camera it's big and bulky compared to most smartphones as I mentioned in the galaxy s3 comparison while portrait use is possible it's not preferable because of the awkward way it sits in the hand landscape dual handed use is preferred again no surprise there even for a camera though it's big this is not a pocketable device because of that massive optical zoom machinery what was a surprise was the size of the battery included in the galaxy camera only 1650 milliamp hours and that limitation was really apparent I don't know why Samsung couldn't find a way to include a beefier battery in this big hardware it was easy to go from a full charge to a depleted cell and just over half a day with heavy usage and once again that's usage as a smart phone substitute not as a camera so it won't affect you if you're using the device for its intended purpose but it was still quite disappointing for such a big and heavy device to die so quickly Samsung's taken some steps to squeeze as much endurance as possible from the camera and that's resulted in some odd behavior there's an auto power off that you can optimize in the settings menu but the device also goes into a kind of a deep standby at times that prevents it from receiving timely notifications almost all of my email text and gtalk alerts were delayed significantly during my time with the unit in standby which says to me that Samsung has tweaked the unit's listening settings when the screen is off I was also surprised by how much lag there was daily use I thought that the same quad core Exynos processor is the galaxy s3 this thing should be screaming particularly with project butter enhancements it felt a lot like the unit CPU had been down clocked and I was confused until I discovered that the power saving feature was on I'm not sure if this happened out of the box or if this is something I did and then forgot but you'll want to check that setting if you're feeling a lot of lag on your Galaxy camera because it absolutely does limit the CPUs efficiency in the name of battery life leading to a less than ideal software experience taking the Galaxy camera around town as my smartphone replacement was as you might expect again a study in compromise while it bore all the challenges that come with using a device in a manner not intended it actually shined by virtue of including the full suite of enhancements that any high-end Android device offers in 2013 but at for $99.99 this is no impulse purchase or trivial investment while I like it a lot and it's a very capable camera I'd wait for the next generation hopefully with slimmer hardware and a beefier battery to give this the full thumbs-up for data centric shutter bugs looking to replace their smartphone that's going to do it for Galaxy camera as daily driver a weekend experiment thank you for watching if you have something to say please leave a comment on the post at pocketnow.com where there's a few more observations in print form alongside 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