While smartphone cameras today are better than they used to be, there are still issues in their use as a primary camera. If you try to take a precisely timed shot, chances are that it won't work out without multiple tries, leading to posing etc. very fake looking images. Furthermore most smartphone cameras have a moderate wide angle lens and to get wider angle images, stitching is used and the automatic stitching results (which is how people do it in practice with smartphone cameras) are quite gross aesthetically; there is distortion and artifacts. People make selfies with the moderate wide angle, leading to quite bad distortion of the features. I think it's a temporary thing and people will eventually feel disgust when they look at many of these images. Hopefully they will disappear in a server crash somewhere. While the iPhone 7 plus has a slightly longer lens available the thing is that to get a nicely proportioned portrait you need to move the camera some distance away, and this is not what people do with a smartphone, really. This whole culture is warped in narcissism. People post distorted pictures of their faces with a wide angle lens, they post their food, and cat videos that they found, with the assumption that other people would be interested in this stuff. I think this cannot really last for very long and people will grow weary of this whole culture. When publishing stuff carried some threshold of editorial review, we didn't have to see so much bad content. Of course, some good content was also excluded. I don't like the idea that basically algorithms decide, what content gets highlighted. It would be better if there were people to do the selection. But I guess that train went long ago and there is no going back. Although content that is strictly editorially reviewed does exist, but is it popular enough to succeed?
The smartphone camera does not make it easy to create good photography. The touch screen is unresponsive, making it difficult to get reliably and precisely timed shots. There are no easy to use exposure controls. The requirement for a flat lens limits focal length and applications. The fact that it is everywhere basically promotes the idea of publishing half-hearted efforts to a far too big audience for the content's true value. A slower process has the advantage that the users have time to think before posting. Of course I'm not saying that the process should be unnecessarily clumsy, but there are advantages in taking one's time before publishing content, whether images or text.
The question then is: if the smallest and least expensive compact cameras do not have a clear competitive advantage over the smartphone camera, what is the next step up which does in fact produce visibly better results? I thought that would be at the RX100/Nikon DL level. Perhaps Nikon feels that market also saturated with competition. Then there is the small sensor mirrorless, CX, MFT, and APS-C models.
Is direct connectivity to smartphone the way people want to use a dedicated camera? How large a proportion of users consider this very important? I guess manufacturers will eventually get this to work fluidly, but I fear the bad rap Snapbridge has given Nikon so far ... will it recover after the technology works reliably on most devices?
I guess the instant upload culture has the advantage that people don't get to edit their shots much and it gives a sort of "as is" reflection of events, even though it looks bad and careless most of the time and it's difficult to catch a telling moment. If there are dozens of camera phones witnessing an event, it's possible someone will catch a good moment. It doesn't feel very satisfying.
