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As you can imagine, the camera on the BlackBerry Storm 2 is not going to rival the likes of the Samsung Pixon12 or the Sony Ericsson Satio, but this 3.2MP effort with single LED flash performs well enough when necessary.
The camera is very much what you'd expect a camera to be from a BlackBerry - it's functional, it performs well enough in decent light and it works quickly. Shutter speed could be improved somewhat as we had to wait a little too long to start another picture, but overall we were fairly impressed.
While the Storm 2 only has a 2x digital zoom, a nice touch comes in the fact you can stroke the screen up and down to zoom in and out - this is something we think more touchscreen phones should employ, as it's the kind of 'cool factor' they can and should exploit.
The rest of the camera functionality is basic - you can set the single LED flash to fire or not, a half press of the easy-to-find shutter button will bring decent autofocus and the image stabilisation seems to work pretty well.
Pictures don't always come out in the best quality, especially when an element of low light creeps in, but then again you're not going to be trying to win any photography prizes with the Storm 2 we suspect.
Some nice touches once the photo is taken do appear though - not only can you edit and set the photo for use elsewhere on the device (for a contact or as a wallpaper, for instance) but there's also an option to email it, send it as an SMS or post it on Facebook or Twitter if you've got those applications installed.
In fact, the gallery mode is much as you'd expect in the same way as the camera - it just does what you need it to do - you can slide through the pictures with a simple finger swipe and post them to various locations as described above easily.
Video recording
Taking pictures is all very well, but sometimes you want to see many of them in very quick succession, almost like the pictures are moving. This is called video, friend, and you'll be pleased to know video recording is carried on the Storm 2 as well.
It's even more basic than the camera - the options are simple - you can turn the LED on or off to act as a video light (a very nice touch, by the way).
RIM hasn't published specs on the video recording quality, but a quick poke through the settings tells us its HVGA (most decent mobile phone cameras carry at least VGA) and we'd estimate it runs at 24fps, as the footage taken is actually fairly smooth.
Oh, there is another cool thing - when you move the phone from portrait to landscape the on-screen settings move with you. It's the little things that keep some of us amused.
