Yes, the camera on the current iPhone is certainly top-notch, but there’s only so much you can do with a cameraphone. There is now word that a standalone point-and-shoot digital camera is being developed in Cupertino. For instance, the increasingly slimming iPhone and iPad are necessarily limited in their photography abilities, because you simply can’t place a long zoom lens on there. With a standalone digital camera, you can.

If you’ve read the biography of Steve Jobs that Walter Isaacson wrote, then you may remember when Jobs said he wanted to reinvent television, textbooks and photography. Apple is arguably doing textbooks already with the Textbooks initiative in iBooks and we’ve been hearing rumors of an Apple HDTV already. That leaves photography. The “New iPad Buyers’ Guide” by iLounge features a two-page spread on this topic of an Apple P&S.

Given Apple’s propensity for high performance in a simplified package, the camera can’t possibly be a DSLR. I imagine the Apple iCamera, iShot, iCapture, i___ would do away with most of the manual controls too, leaving you with an auto mode that’d take care of things like ISO, aperture, shutter speed, EV, and so on. Just like how Mac OS X, iOS, and even the click wheel changed the way we use the respective devices, we just have to wonder how Apple would change the way that we take pictures.

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*** Grain of salt alert ***

Remember that Lytro point-and-shoot box camera we talked about back in October? Well, it appears like Steve Jobs was “interested” in that technology, so that’s enough for people to “speculate” that the sensor might make its way into an iPhone sometime in the future.

The new info comes to us courtesy of the folks over at 9to5Mac who went through a new book by Fortune Magazine’s Adam Lashinsky titled, Inside Apple. According to the book, Jobs met with Lytro inventor and CEO Ren Ng to discuss about the possibilities of using Lytro technology in an iPhone.

Just in case you are wondering what this new tech is all about, the Lytro “whole light field” camera, which contains an f/2 aperture and an 8x optical zoom lens, captures all the light rays flowing in its direction instead of fixed focus pixels. This will allow you to take photos whenever you want and you can focus on anything from the scene at a later point in time.  Yeah I know, sounds wild. Although the first Lytro camera captures just 1MP photos, the technology allows the manipulation of the pictures in many ways: such as changing the depth of field and focus. You can simply forget about getting that shot in focus, and just take it.

The possibilities are endless if this type of technology reaches an iPhone sometime in the future, it will be even better when combined with specialized apps. But there are problems; the big size of the sensor and the picture quality, but that can always be improved in time. And manufacturers will also get a chance to incorporate fixed-focus lenses into the devices instead of the thicker autofocus ones.

But we are not expecting Apple to start playing with the new tech until it matures. It seems unlikely that it will be available on the next-generation iPhone. But we believe it will be just awesome when it finally arrives.

The post How Would You Like An iPhone 5 With A Lytro Sensor? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Flickr is a great way for sharing pictures with your friends and the online community at large. There are plenty of professionals who post up edited pictures from their DSLRs, but casual shooters can share their snapshots too. However, the iPhone 4 is quickly becoming the most popular “camera” on the photo sharing site, even though it’s not really a camera in the traditional sense.

Right now, the Apple iPhone 4 is holding on to the second spot in terms of number of uploads to Flickr, straggling just behind the Nikon D40. These are two entirely different beasts, as the D40 is already three years old… that, and it’s a hefty SLR compared to a slim smartphone.

What this also means is that the iPhone 4 has effectively beat out all the compact point-and-shoots on the site, the top five of which are all Canon PowerShot models. Does this mean that the iPhone 4 is more popular than any of these models? Does it mean that it’s a better camera? No, not at all.

What it means is that the iPhone 4 makes it so easy to share photos, because you just snap and upload immediately from within the phone itself. The singular model philosophy of Apple aids this, as I’m sure Android folks are snapping and sharing shots too, but over multiple models and manufacturers. The same can be said about the multiple Canon PowerShots in the list.

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