After deciding to use the Palm Pre on a regular basis, I quickly realised it’s 3 megapixel camera wouldn’t be up to job (especially as you seem to need a pretty steady hand – which I thought I had!). Being unable to make effective use of the camera on the Pre was somewhat unfortunate as a converged feature rich device would be ideal when travelling – however it does mean the battery on the Pre might last that little bit longer between charges.

The upshot of this meant that I needed to purchase a digital camera and after looking around at all the options available from the various manufacturers I opted for the Canon Digital IXUS 200 IS digital camera – though the Sony Cybershot DSCT900B came pretty close.

The one thing that I fell is really missing from the Canon camera package is a memory card which means you can’t use it out of the box so you either need to have a spare one handy or order one at the same time you get the camera. Items you do get in the box include the digital camera itself, a wrist strap, a battery charger and battery, audio/visual cable, computer cable, software and manuals.

Once the camera was charged and setup it was time to get to grips with the touch screen – which involves tapping (for selecting icons), double-tapping (for switching to index display from playback), and dragging (for moving between images or panning around). When taking a photo you can simply touch an area of the screen for the camera to focus upon it – and built in face recognition makes the task a little easier. Taking a photo means pressing the shutter button half way to allow the camera to focus (when a subject is in focus a green box appears around the area) then pressing the shutter button down takes the shot. The camera is pretty light to hold in the hand at only 130g and its pretty slim too at 22.9mm.

The built-in accelerometer is a nifty feature too allowing navigation around images simply by shaking the phone (one of the few times when a shaky hand works in your favour!).

Taking video clips works in a similar way  – but bear in mind a few things about video shooting

• Maximum video shooting time is around ten minutes
• Some memory cards may lead to shorter shooting times – the memory card I bought seems to limit the camera to thirty second clips – you need an SD Speed Class 4 or higher memory card for longer shooting times.

Some of the key features of the Canon Digital IXUS 200 IS include:

• 12.1 Mega pixels (approx)
• DIGIC 4 Image Processor
• 5x optical zoom
• Li-ion battery
• Memory card support including SD, SDHC, MMCplus, HC MMCplus, and MultiMediaCards (see note above about speed class)
• 3” touch screen offering 16:9 aspect ratio
• Face detection technology
• Motion detection technology
• Red eye correction
• Intelligent Contrast Correction
• HD Movie Recording at 1280×720 with 30fps
• HDMI mini connector for output
• Software for the Macintosh (Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista)

It’s early days with the camera still so I’ll post an update when it’s had a good run.