Yikes, this is the graph for usage of cameraphones on flickr. Last time I looked at this it was a nice and fair fight between the N95 and the iPhone. Clearly now the iPhone is far out in the lead. Which is surprising as it’s not a particularly great camera at all. What it does do though, clearly, is make it relatively easy to take photos for most people, and I guess it’s pretty unarguable that the iPhone is the most usable smartphone by some scary distance.
I, meanwhile, am remaining an uncool N95 kid and intend on maybe upgrading to an N97 when it comes out.
I think it’s not just that the iPhone makes it easy to take photos — my daughter’s Sony cameraphone has a much better and easier to use camera, for example. I think it’s that the iPhone makes it much, much easier to get photos onto Flickr.
I suppose a large part of that ease of use is that it’s essentially impossible to buy the iPhone without a data plan, so anyone who gets one is only a few taps from seeing something to getting it up on-line.
If only facebook had some similar statistics to compare.
I actually find the picture quality on the iPhone is surprisingly good. There’s no flash and there’s no zoom, so it doesn’t have great versatility, but the fundamental picture quality is really rather good. Colours, contrast and definition are among the best I’ve seen on cameraphones (including my ex-phone, a Sony-Ericsson K800i Cybershot, which was excellent).