Earlier today, I was in the McDonald's in the West Belt Plaza in Wayne, NJ. While I was ordering, I happened to see the flash of a camera out of the corner of my eye. I took a quick glance and saw that this was not just a camera, but a camera phone with a built-in flash. After waiting for the conversation to die down, I approached the owner of the camera and asked for details. Here's what I found out.

She was using a Samsung E715 with service on T-Mobile. It's very small and has a nice feel to it. I later found out that this phone weighs 3.4 ounces and has a camera with a 640 x 480 resolution. The main display is a 128 x 160 LCD that can display 65,000 colors. The secondary display is an 80 x 64 grayscale OLED, so it glows all the time. It displays time, date, missed calls, signal strength, and battery power.

I got her to mail me a photo from the camera (which I agreed not to post), and the quality seems very good. The flash certainly improved the photo, because it was taken in a combination of natural and fluorescent light that needed help from a fill flash. From I've seen on-line, it looks like the camera can even be white balanced.

This is the first time I've seen an E715, and I think it's definitely a step-up from most camera phones. It lacks a few things that some Operation Gadget readers are looking for, like Bluetooth and a speakerphone. It has IRDA, but some message boards I looked at said that it's difficult or impossible to get the E715 to interoperate with some IRDA-compatible devices.

If you are in the market for a camera phone with some extra features that make it useable for posting photos on the Internet, the Samsung E715 is a good one to evaluate.