We don’t say this enough, but when it comes to gadgets, substance trumps style. Even if a gadget is pretty and stylish, it’s worthless if it doesn’t do what’s intended. Sure, Kodak’s EasyShare V803 might be pretty and stylish. Unfortunately it’s also a very poor digital camera.

Despite its fat, candy bar shape, the V803’s smooth curves and array of colors make it quite comely. Unfortunately, the camera’s sleek design makes for an uncomfortable control scheme. A handful of tiny rectangular buttons strewn across the top and left side of the camera back access the V803’s different modes and menus. The buttons feel unresponsive and are placed so that you have to use two hands while operating the camera, and we had a hard time trying to distinguish between them by touch. Also, you have to use a small, awkward-to-manipulate joystick to navigate the camera’s various settings and menus. In our field tests, it often mistranslated directional taps and button pushes for each other.

The Kodak V803 includes user-friendly functions such as in-camera digital red-eye removal, a blurry picture warning, and a new “Maintain Settings” menu that lets the user store their preferred settings such as flash, white balance, ISO, and resolution for use each time the camera is powered on.

Other Kodak V803 features include 4x digital zoom, three metering modes (multi-pattern, center-weighted, or center-spot), +/- 2.0 EV exposure compensation, 2, or 10 second self-timer, and a Movie mode that produces QuickTime MOV (MPEG-4) files with audio at 640 x 480, or 320 x 240 pixel resolution at a rate of up to 30 frames per second.