There really is no way getting around it. HTC has a lot of merits, but camera quality is not one of them. They probably have the worst quality cameras available on any high-end smartphone right now. Saying the camera is useless or inconsequential is pretty much a minority opinion. The trend has been for better cameras each and every generation and they are vital selling points, or HTC would not care to up the pixel count to 8MP in their spec sheets even if they don't actually have capable optics to match. The FLIP line of handheld cameras have been discontinued because cellphones have cannibalized their sales. Average consumers are gonna choose the phone with the better camera, for twitpic-ing, youtube uploading, facebook galleries, saving memories, etc. regardless of whether it is DSLR quality or not. The closer, the better. The obvious gold standard is the iPhone, which raises the bar that every other company has to meet or surpass, since they drive pop culture and everyone will want a camera at least as good as an iPhone's. The internet may rage about how much the iPhone sucks, but not a lot of phones can actually match many aspects of it, especially the camera. I'm not sure any flagship HTC phones like the Sensation can even match 3GS quality pictures. The Nokia N8 and large sensor be damned.
For those that don't have short term memories, Nokia was popular in the US during the candy bar era. Their phones really were built like tanks. It was one of the most popular brands. Then for some reason they started to die off. There were a lot of cool phones, but they were overseas only. To be truthful, I had sworn off Nokia several years back because of their bad build quality in their phones, especially higher-midrange and high-end ones I ebayed from overseas. The 6233 was cheap and falling apart. The N73 was cheap. N95 was cheap. Pretty much most of their high-end N series phones were cheap shiny plastic, not even the nice kind of plastic. Kind of odd when their midrange S40 phones had stainless steel and aluminum builds. I'm over it though. The W9 looks like a quality product with the unibody design and polycarbonate, fully colored through premium plastic. Leaked videos and images already prove the camera up to Nokia standards. Even comparable to the N8 most of the time. That's good, because the N8 runs Symbian and I think it is one of the ugliest phones imaginable. The recently released X7 is pretty ugly too...
Oh umm...I'm not being off topic! The Eternity...err....has a bigger screen than my 4.5" Infuse and thus is too big for me. Not for usability, but for pocketability. There's also a range of screen sizes, pretty much where all cellphones fall into, where the browser experience doesn't vary that much even with a bigger screen. I had a 3.3" phone before, and the 4.5" Infuse isn't that big of a leap to be honest. It's still hard to read. The distance I hold the phone from my face might be different between the two, but they are both within the high focus eyestrain zone. So I'd choose pocketability and ergonomics more in this case.
Dave
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