Name: Explorer
Brand: HTC

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Camera

Little more than a check mark on the desirable specs sheet tick list designed to entice potential buyers, the HTC Explorer's camera comes with a distinct lack of performance-enhancing features, with no LED flash or autofocus and a meagre 3.15-megapixel sensor that fails to impress on any front.

A barebones snapper that doesn't even offer you the option of tapping areas of the screen to direct the camera's focus, the HTC Explorer's rear-mounted image capturer suffers from dire light management abilities. This turns days with less than blazing sunshine into shadowy nights that lack contrast or depth to the images.

Add to this heavily grained images due to the low quality sensor and even lower quality lens and you have a photographic ability that disappoints with each new shot and defies the statement that the best camera is the one you have with you.

With a noticeable lack of optional scene modes, available image manipulating variable settings do little to counteract the poor shots that plague the HTC Explorer's camera, with the picture capture options meekly extending no further that the chance to shoot with a greyscale, negative or sepia-tinted filter.

Although geo-tagging and face detection features are included, any potential saving grace is quickly pushed aside with the lack of autofocus and abysmal shutter speed joining forces to ensure that even in ideal light conditions snaps come out far from defined and with shallow edges. Even a slight wobble in the hand - something that is hard to avoid during the lengthy capture period - ruins the faint hope of an acceptable shot on the HTC Explorer.

Ensuring that pictures taken indoors are even worse than those in natural light, the handset's poor colour management and lack of integrated LED flash means shots in artificial lighting lack any appealing nature, with graining increasing and visual noise distortion further depleting the outcome.