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At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, T-Mobile and Samsung officially unveiled the Memoir, a touch screen cell phone with an 8-megapixel camera.

The Memoir, when it is released on February 25, will be the first mobile phone with that high a resolution camera in U.S. It will go for $249.99 with a two-year service agreement, qualifying data plan, and after a $50 mail-in rebate.

Its 8-megapixel shooter sports a Xenon flash, 16x digital zoom, CMOS auto focus, five different shooting modes— including single, continuous, panorama, smile shot and mosaic—and the ability to record up to 60 minutes of video. Users can create customized slideshows with music and different transitions on the device, and then share those pictures (as well as videos) using the TV-out feature.

Accessing the Memoir’s camera menu, users can adjust the brightness and flash, change the default destination of images, select a timer and zoom in or out. In addition, the Memoir’s shooter:

Allows users to set special effects on an image, including black and white, sepia, negative and watercolor;

Features blink detection, face detection, anti-shake to reduce blur, and geo-tagging, which records coordinate information of where the user is at the time the picture is taken into the image files;

Provides settings for a variety of shooting situations, including portrait, landscape, night, sports, party/indoor, beach snow, sunset, dawn, fall color, fireworks and backlight;

Automatically changes the white balance using the setting appropriate for the light source, including daylight, incandescent, fluorescent or cloudy;

The cell phone, which supports T-Mobile's 3G data network, also features a full HTML Web browser, an on-screen QWERTY keyboard, and a-GPS.

At the end of last year, T-Mobile's 3G network was available to more than 100 million people in more than 130 US cities, across 27 major markets, according to the carrier. It plans on doubling the covered population to more than 200 million by the end of 2009.