The World's Most Popular Camera

Is shortly going to be the a mobile phone (in this case, the Apple iPhone). I'd give it a matter of weeks until this happens. Follow this trend yourself in Flickr's Camera Finder.




Partially, this is a quirk with the way apple classifies it's photo EXIF data. They roll up all of their mobile picture taking devices under one (first generation iphone, second generation 3G and even the new iphone 3gs). This means all these millions of cameras are contributing to this trend as opposed to major camera manufacturers and cell phone makers, who break out each device separately. So partially this is a bookkeeping trick.

But more significantly, mobile phones are certainly going to become the way most human beings capture and share images. The new iphone camera is good enough for most people to mean they don't have to buy a point and shoot camera. It's also going to negate the need for most people to have a video camera, as techcrunch reported this weekend. If you're a serious photographer or videographer, of course, you will have fancier equipment. But I'd propose that for most peope, the newest mobile phones are more than good enough.

What does this mean? It means the people in the business of photos (camera manufacturers, printers, photo sharing web sites) had better have a story about how they make life easier for customers with mobile devices that take pictures and connect to the internet.