my flipphone has a 3.2 megapixel camera and the pictures are ghetto tastic.useful if your girlfriend flashes you and you need it in a pinch otherwise no point whatsoever. frigging 1 megapixel is a joke. gotto squeeze out that extra 4 cents from the 2 megapixel upgrade. it comes down to actually being worth the development costs of even having it. if your going to invest in it like that put at least 3.2 to make it worth it. otherwise your adding something completely pointless for the the amount of developer research you put into it.
You know, this thread is downright hilarious. I am sorry to say that people are so ingrained in a megapixel myth. Number of megapixels has no direct correlation to actual sensor quality. Just because the number is higher, does not make it any better.
I own an iphone 4, HTC Evo 4g, Panasonic Lumix TS-4 and a Canon S90.
The iphone is 5 megapixels, evo 4g is 8 mega pixels, panasonic is 8 mega pixels and the canon is 10. Out of all these the best one is the canon, Not because it's the most mega pixels, but the optics and sensor are top notch. The bottom rung out of all of these is the evo 4g at 8 megapixels. The sensor in it to be honest sucks. Pictures looked washed out and grainy. It puts out large 8 megapixel image that looks like crap. The panasonic does the same 8 megapixels 100x better. The iphone 4, I love the pictures compared to the evo 4g, even though I alway carry both, because apple picked the sensor inside it for quality rather than quantity of pixels. Yes the evo 4g has more megapixels, but the sensor sucks. If you don't believe me, pick up a 50$ 10-14 megapixel vivtar camera and try taking pictures with it. It makes cell phone camera pics look good lol.
The key here is that apple intends for us to use the back camera to chat and take video with. A sensor with more light gathering capacity and higher quality will beat number of megapixels anyday. The inherent limitation is thickness. The larger the sensor you use the longer your optics you will have to use. Have you ever seen a paper thin professional camera?
And finally, remember. Apple doesn't have any of our best interests at heart. They are a publicly traded company. They are obligated to shareholders to make as much profit as legally possible. Apple will sell a ton of ipad 2s, regardless if people whine about how many megapixels it is. Obviously the iphone 4 sensor would be nice, but I bet Steve-o said, hey no one would bother using this as a real camera. Most people wealthy enough to keep buying my crap own much nicer cameras and or iphone 4s. Why not make more profit on each one of them?
