Putting more than five megapixels in a cell phone camera seems more than stupid to me. It’s an act of shooting one’s proverbial “design self” in the foot! It’s not just that the tiny, fixed-focus, simple lens can’t resolve more than a couple of megapixels. To cram more pixels on the sensor, they have to be made smaller. The smaller the pixel, the less light it can detect, so the more electrical noise it generates, so the noisier the image becomes…

We’ve seen this phenomenon in point-and-shoot digital cameras recently. Pixels are now ridiculously small and noisy. Megapixel counts are so high, that even in bright sun at ISO 80, you can see noise in the shadows with some cameras!

The camera review sites on the web have known this for years, and complained about it loudly. Camera manufacturers are starting to listen, and to concentrate on improving low light, high ISO performance by balancing a range of factors. Some recent models have actually dropped MP counts from 12 or 14 down to 10, so they could reduce the noise by improving pixel size and sensitivity.

Cell phone cameras have always been crappy. Is this a conspiracy to make them worse? To quote Eddie Murphy, “I ain’t fallin’ fo no banana in mah tailpipe!” Keep it to 5MP or less until the lens capabilities, sensor size, image processing algorithms, and other factors can be balanced.

Apple isn’t likely to jump to a 14.6-megapixel image sensor, from the current 3.2-megapixel one.

But when you say “There isn’t a smartphone on the market with a lens capable of taking advantage of even a 2-megapixel sensor” you are wrong.

If you compare the photos taken with the current iPhone 3Gs 3.2-megapixel camera, and compare it to the old iPhone 2-megapixel camera, you will see a HUGE difference in picture quality.

No, it’s not just an extra million pixels that are (as you put it) “random noise”. There is more detail, much better color accuracy, and less artifacts than in the previous camera.

It’s true that the lenses you get in phone-cameras are not as large or as good as those in stand-alone cameras. But those cell phone lenses, image sensors, and electronics, are improving greatly along with the megapixel numbers.

It doesn’t matter what Apple CAN do. They’ll do just enough to keep ahead of Android phones, which makes a lot of sense. Google is aiming to beat the iPhone. So Apple makes sure updates are incrementally better than Androids. Not leagues better, just enough to get you to choose it. If the Androids have 5MP phones, Apple won’t got to 14, they’ll go to 7. That leaves Apple with 7 MORE megapixels just sitting on the shelf that can trump Android improvements.

Apple doesn’t want to try knocking out Google with one punch. It’s much more effective to have a decent #2 in the market, so your product looks even better. If the competition sucks, people are more likely to look at what stinks about your product. But if it’s good, people see what’s even better in yours. Toyota isn’t just impressive because they make good cars. They’re impressive because people see their cars as even better than Hondas and Fords. You can buy a really good car from Honda. But you can (supposedly) get an even better one from Toyota.