 This is David with The Verge and this is Samsung's new Galaxy camera, which is essentially a point and shoot camera mashed up with a smartphone. It even looks like a combination of the two. There's a zoom trigger and a shutter press on top and a big lens on the front, but there's also a huge 4.8 inch display on the back. It's actually a decent looking camera, a lot like some of Samsung's other point and shoots and ironically, smartphones. Its plastic body is really wide though and it actually starts to tip forward a bit when the lens is extended just because of how the weight is distributed, so it's a little awkward. The 4.8 inch display is really the most important part of the Galaxy camera though. It's a fantastic 720p screen and it's honestly better than we've seen even on a Samsung smartphone before. It's also a touch screen and is as responsive and useful as you'd expect your phone to be. A slightly smaller screen might be better since it would actually make the camera a little easier to hold and use, especially in one hand, but this is a really great camera display. The Galaxy camera runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, same as the Galaxy S3, and it's pretty much the exact OS you'd expect to see on a Samsung phone, plus some camera specific features. Full Android is good and bad though. You get all the apps you want for photo editing, sharing, and then things like that, but you also get a lot of notifications and pop-ups and sounds that just distract while you're trying to use your camera. There is fortunately a blocking mode which lets you turn all of this stuff off, but that's not on by default. The full Android experience is also not great for battery life. Normally cameras hibernate when you turn the screen off, so they'll last a long time just on standby, but with the Galaxy camera it's still grabbing emails, tweets, and everything else, so the battery only lasts a couple of days even if you're not touching the camera. There's also a setting that turns the wireless radios off whenever the screen's off, but for some odd reason this isn't on by default either. The camera interface is blocked into three categories, and it automatically initiates any time you half-press the shutter button. There's Auto, which is just a set it and forget it automatic mode. There's Smart, which lets you pick scene modes and filters and let the camera adjust automatically, and Expert, which basically puts the camera in manual mode and lets you control aperture and shutter speed and ISO and the like. Auto and Smart work fine, but when you're in Expert it gets a little complicated to wade through all the different menus and options, and you're constantly flicking and scrolling on the touchscreen to change settings. One physical dial would be really nice to have, but instead you end up using the screen for everything. The two most integrated apps with Android and the Galaxy camera are Instagram and Dropbox. The Instagram app itself is a little awkward since it only runs in portrait, and that's not really how you'd want to hold the camera, but it's at least part of the sharing APIs in Android. You also can't zoom in Instagram or any third-party app right now, but apparently that feature is at least coming to Instagram soon. For the most part, at least for now, you're probably better off shooting pictures in the camera app itself and then sharing them from there, which fortunately Android makes really easy. The other great app is Dropbox, which isn't specifically designed for the Galaxy camera, but its auto-upload feature is awesome. You just turn it on and every time you take a picture it automatically uploads to Dropbox, and you get it everywhere else. The most frustrating thing about the Galaxy camera though is that it's not a very good camera. It takes soft pictures without particularly great dynamic range or low-light performance. There's also a lot of barrel distortion, meaning the center of the image tends to bulge as you look at it. The pictures are about the equivalent of an entry-level point-and-shoot, which would be fine if this were priced like an entry-level point-and-shoot, but it's not. Fortunately the 1080p video situation is a lot better, but it's still really nothing to write home about. So in effect, the Galaxy camera is just a $200 camera that costs $499. The extra money does buy some great bells and whistles, but it honestly might be too many. We'd love to have Android in the camera with all the apps and options on the big beautiful screen, but we'd like to have camera-optimized app selection, or fewer notifications, or at least some of those things turned off by default to make the Galaxy camera better as a camera. It's a great proof of concept, and we definitely hope other manufacturers pick up the idea that Android can power a great camera, but unfortunately the Galaxy camera isn't really that great camera.