Originally, I was very sceptical of the value of the cell phone camera. I wondered why anyone would use a crappy digital camera embeded in their phone when perfectly good cheap digital cameras existed.

I concluded that there were two reasons:

1. Convenience. You always carry a cell phone and don’t always carry a camera
2. Cost. A camera costs 200$. A cell phone with a camera may cost 0$. For someone who is cost concious, the vast majority of the human race, this is a significant chunk of change.

I was so stupid. 

I’ve been recently playing with my cell phone’s (Cingular 8525) digital camera. And I discovered, that there were two really, really good reasons to use a cell phone camera:

1. Simple upload to photo sharing site. I finish taking the picture, and then quickly upload the picture without having to painfully download it to my laptop, and then upload. This makes it very easy for me to share my pictures.
2. Ease of tagging and labeling. I don’t remember where I took a picture or why. But my cell phone has a keyboard! So once I am done taking a picture, I quickly label the picture. This way I do not have an endless mysterious collection of pictures.
3. Geo-encoding. Although my cell phone does not have a built-in GPS, my wife’s N95 does. After seeing how her pictures can be geo-encoded (and her routes) I more or less decided that the next camera will either have a built-in GPS receiver or connect to a blue-tooth enabled GPS receiver.

If you combine all these four reasons then the only reason you should not use a cell phone camera is the quality of the lens and sensors. But that’s where the Nokia N95 and Nokia N93i show that the future is the cell phone camera not the standalone snapshot camera. The N95 actually has a 5MP camera with a fansastic lens, a working flash but no zoom. The Nokia N93i is a great camera with a 3x zoom but has a less than ideal form factor. Both of these cell phones overcome the only real reason you would not use a cell phone, that the quality of the pictures is sub-par.

I suspect that the standalone snapshot digital camera will eventually disappear to be replaced by the cell phone camera.