Camera phone at its best!
The fact that Samsung stands atop the global smartphone heap isn’t new information, but the sheer volume of smartphones the Korean company has shipped so far this year is staggering. With the Galaxy S5 just beginning to ship, Samsung’s total shipment volume for the first quarter of the year came to 85 million smartphone units, more than the next four competitors — Apple AAPL -0.34%, Huawei, Lenovo and LG — combinedSamsung Group -is a South Korean multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul. It comprises numerous subsidiaries and affiliated businesses; most of them united under the Samsung brand, and is the largest South Korean business conglomerate.

Samsung was founded by Lee Byung-chul in 1938 as a trading company. Over the next three decades the group diversified into areas including food processing, textiles, insurance, securities and retail.
Samsung entered the electronics industry in the late 1960s and the construction and ship building industries in the mid-1970s; these areas would drive its subsequent growth. Following Lee’s death in 1987, Samsung was separated into four business groups – Samsung Group, Shinsegae Group, CJ Group and Hansol Group. Since the 1990s Samsung has increasingly globalized its activities, and electronics, particularly mobile phones and semiconductors, have become its most important source of income
Samsung’s latest hybrid camera/phone, the Galaxy K Zoom, feels like more of a phone and less of a camera than the previous Galaxy S4 Zoom. It’s a major leap in every way beyond its predecessor, with specs that come a lot closer to the flagship Galaxy S5 and a relatively large 20.7-megapixel sensor with 10x optical zoom.
The K Zoom is a big phone, because it has a big camera in it. It’s 5.4 by 2.8 by 0.8 inches and 7 ounces, but it feels reasonably comfortable in the hand because the body is smoothly rounded, like a big stone. It runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat with a very similar skin to the Galaxy S5.
The 4.8-inch, 1080p Super AMOLED HD screen is bright and saturated; although it doesn’t have the Galaxy S5’s neat software tricks that make the S5 display look near-perfect in all lighting conditions. The phone uses a hexacore (dual 1.7GHz/quad 1.3GHz) Samsung Exynos processor.
Other specs include 2GB of RAM, 8 or 16GB of storage, plus a Micro SD card slot, and the usual LTE and other wireless networks. It comes in white, black, and electric blue.
I’m impressed by how much the K Zoom feels like a phone. The back is the same textured-plastic material as on the Galaxy S5, and the lens doesn’t protrude much from the back (although you can definitely feel it’s there.) That makes the K Zoom much more comfortable to hold and tap as a normal phone than the S4 Zoom.
Hit the hardware shutter button and the lens extends, which takes about a second. The shutter button has dual-detent focus-and-shoot, if you want it, and you can separate the AE and AF points for dramatic images. Since the phone has the usual absurd number of Samsung camera modes, a “Pro Suggest” mode analyses your frame and picks the five modes or filters it thinks are appropriate. More camera modes and filters are downloadable from a custom store. Optical image stabilization works for stills and 1080p videos at up to 60 frames per second.
“Selfie Alarm” is an ill-named, but witty feature that lets you take self-shots with the main 20-megapixel camera as opposed to the 2-megapixel front camera. When you turn the camera to face you, it beeps if you’re in frame, and then steadily more quickly as you stay in frame – and then it shoots the picture automatically.
With no zoom active, they were a little dark but quite sharp at the centre of the frame, with some blurring in the corners of the image. Visible noise showed up at full 10x zoom. The auto mode handled a switch to macro without a problem, and kept suggesting various camera modes that looked a lot like Instagram filters to me. The shutter felt pleasantly instantaneous.
I liked this camera/phone. It’s narrower than the Galaxy S5 and does away with some of the S5’s gimmicky features (the heart rate monitor and fingerprint scanner) in exchange for something people will really use: a high-quality camera. That said, it’s still thicker and heavier than most smartphones and will appeal only to serious “phone-tographers.”