Interesting. I have heard from so many friends that current iPhone camera is about as good as it can get. Curious what you are expecting more - just bumped up mega pixels? Not sure how much that would matter - going from 5MP to 8MP for e.g.
Better lens; more light in == better pictures(broad generalization). A teardrop shaped phone would allow it to have a larger longer lens up top but still feel relatively light and thin. I haven't done research on the iPhone 4's current ccd chip but there is always room for improvement on things. Not necessarily an increase in specs but an increase in response time, decrease in noise levels, larger ccd, etc....
I didn't indicate anywhere that megapixels == quality.
When you just about max out the quality of a given MP value with given hardware constraints, as I think the iPhone 4 has done, the only real way to go up is increasing MP.
I can't be bothered to dig up some review for you, as my observations come from personal experience. Your best bet is to look for HTC Sensation reviews with unmodified example shots and videos.
If you look at some of stuff at SIGGRAPH in computational photography, you could add a couple of more 5mp sensors and create some truly amazing images given the iPhone's programability. A 4 sensor iPhone (5mp or the newer 8mp) would be amazing.
Just put them right next to each other in a 2 x 2. The amount of room is pretty small. They should also improve the camera API to allow full use like the FCam API.
Nice. I was thinking of 3D stuff, though. That could be sort-of done in software (let user move the camera, estimate motion from images & sensors, compensate images for motion artifacts), but having two or four cameras at corners of the device would be easier, allow for photographing moving objects, etc. (pan iPhone is about as tall as human eye-eye distance, so this should enable non-macro 3D stuff.
I do not think we will stuff like that before we have 3D screens on our iPhones, though.
You can do some pretty amazing stuff to get much better pictures with multiple cameras. The stuff they did with the Nokia phone with 1 camera is pretty impressive, but having multiple can really do wonders. The other advantage to multiple cameras is the ability to have less dense sensors allowing more light.
I am not a big fan of 3D currently. I just don't see it as good for small devices and it is hard on the eyes. I really think that the other uses for computational photography would make for a killer feature on a main stream phone.
There was a photo posted online from within Apple that someone analyzed, and there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that it was from a new iPhone. There was a spec bump to 8MP, but the extra resolution didn't really add additional detail (which is common for 8MP phone camera sensors).
I guess we'll see next week whether that was the real device or not.
