The iPhone 4 takes fantastic pictures, for a phone. With the myTouch 4G Slide, HTC's promising the first phone since the iPhone that takes better pictures and doesn't suck at, well, everything else.
The Slide's got an 8-megapixel back-illuminated sensor (also found in the iPhone 4, and a ton of higher end point-and-shoots, like from Sony) and a superfast lens (for a phone anyway, at f/2.2 versus the iPhone 4's f/2.4). That means un-sucky photos even in low-light conditions, in theory. Plus, modes like Panorama shot, HDR and a rapid-fire burst shooting let you flex your camera phone photography muscle. It also has "zero shutter lag." The camera automatically starts buffering as soon as the photo app launches, continuing to cache in the background until you push the camera button. The camera software then records the timestamp of your press and matches it to the photo in the buffer—another feature borrowed from higher-end point-and-shoots. The question is how the photos will actually look, though, since part of the reason the iPhone 4's outclassed most other phones is how the shots were tweaked in processing.
Besides the camera, the 4G Slide is your standard Android smartphone with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, with HTC's Sense 3.0 and T-Mobile myTouch stuff on top (though T-Mobile's using a lighter hand this time around, pulling back on stuff it used to add to every myTouch phone). And it's one of the few Android handsets to natively support Netflix. The keyboard is pretty solid, based on our few minutes of tapping on it. The surprising thing is how thin the phones manages to be despite the humongo keyboard, with both halves of the phone thinner than an iPhone 4.
This could be T-Mobile's next killer phone when it launches sometime in July—we'll see. [T-Mobile]