Spice S-1200 12 Megapixel Camera Phone

The camera phone has been steadily evolving and we’re up to 12 megapixels right now with features like face, smile and even blink detection technology putting them almost on the same league as some compact digicams that cost just as much. So far there have been just two 12MP camera phones that have been officially available on the market and Spice’s S-1200 is the third. They’ve managed to beat the competition’s pricing quite drastically but will it live up to their standards? Take a closer look.

Form Factor
The S-1200 is a very generic looking handset in a sort of old fashion bulky way.  From the front it’s hard to tell that this mobile packs a 12 megapixel camera with 3X optical zoom and a xenon flash. There’s no other camera on the Indian market (officially) that has a camera quite like this, not the Sony Ericsson Satio and not the Samsung Pixon12. Micromax had developed a rather large and extremely bulky 8MP camera phone with 3X optical zoom about a year ago, but the S-1200 has managed to keep things sleeker and simpler in comparison and has gone with a traditional mobile look rather than a touchscreen. The handset isn’t heavy enough to complain about (130 g) but like I said, it’s thick enough (16mm in depth) to leave a bulge in your pocket. On the other hand, it's not like the competition is thinner.

The 2.4-inch TFT LCD sports a 240 x 320 pixel resolution and is sharp enough to read clearly even in bright sunlit conditions. While the navigation system and the buttons around it are okay, the keypad is a little too congested and typing is not easy at all. The bottom of the nav-pad is too close to the ‘2’ key which makes hitting that button a real problem. It’ll take some getting used to. The middle section of keys double up for camera shortcuts as do the top and bottom buttons on the nav-pad (zoom in and out). On one side are the volume keys that can also be used for zooming, followed by the camera activation key that also works as the selector to switch between stills and video, and then the Shutter release. A universal mini USB port is at the bottom and a microSD card slot (supports 32GB cards) is located on the other side. Not incorporating a standardized 3.5 mm hands-free, with so much space available, was a bad idea.