Perhaps the biggest ding in the TL225's armor is its battery life. As you might imagine, all those advanced features come at the expense of battery juice. In our lab's battery tests, the camera managed to take just 182 photos on a single battery charge, far short of the 300-shot count that most recent point-and-shoots have registered, and only sufficient for a battery life rating of Fair.

This is a love-it-or-hate-it camera. It's hard to imagine a point-and-shoot that can match the TL225's cool factor; and a couple of its innovations (the gesture-based controls and the front-panel LCD) may soon become commonplace in point-and-shoot cameras. But its performance falls short of its $350 price tag, suggesting that the lion's share of that sum goes for the camera's fancy trappings.

The design and touchscreen interface on this camera are near-perfect, and if Samsung can iron out the battery-life and image-quality issues, the TL225's successors could be a huge hit. The TL225 is fun to use and its features attract a lot of attention, but we expected better image quality and battery life for the price.

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