While exploring the wildly overpopulated show room floor at the Consumer Electronics Expo in Las Vegas, we stumbled upon LG's latest touchscreen cameraphone, the Renoir. It's named after a French painter because it's supposed to give would-be-aesthetics-experts the power to generate great images. Its 8-megapixel camera takes pictures that can then be edited (on the phone itself) with artistic effects and beauty-enhancing touchups. It also features face-tagging, blink detection, and geotagging for photos.

We tested out many of the phone's features, and our reaction was mixed. The camera was great (for a phone), but the practical experience left something to be desired, and due to the Renoir's lack of a U.S. carrier we weren't able to test anything that involved actually making calls or using the data network.

We didn't feel that the touch screen was responsive enough. We had to press down quite hard to get it to respond to scrolling gestures, although simply pressing to select was a little easier. It was a far cry from the iPhone or others like it. In general, we weren't satisfied with the interface. It wasn't running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, or any other common platform. Instead, it's something LG concocted itself. It seemed a bit like a cell phone interface from 2002 with a touchscreen thrown in for good measure. We expect better from a phone this high-end.

But the ultimate appeal here is obviously the 8-megapixel camera. We took pictures of people on the show room floor. The lighting in the LG booth was unusual, so it wasn't a perfect test, but the camera seemed to perform well enough. There are a lot of stand-alone cameras out there already that produce better images, though. You just might not find them in a phone!

Big-draw features we weren't able to test: geotagging, DivX playback, and anything that might have involved network use (web browsing, for example). The demo phone had no SIM card, so it couldn't connect to any cellular networks. Like we said, though, you probably won't find a better cameraphone on the market, so if taking snapshots is all that matters to you, keep an eye out for this one. It's available now in Europe, with a North American release date forthcoming.