A German company called Schneider Kreuznach was curious about whether or not the increasing megapixel capacity of cell phone cameras will eventually mean that people will abandon their stand-alone digital cameras and opt for cell phone cameras instead. So they ran a study...and found a good number of early adopters eager to make the switch (hooray, convergence!) - but only once the megapixel level goes up to the current 6 or 7 found in modern stand-alones. The article that mentions the study links the rise in camera quality to better optics, so it's possible we'll hit higher levels of quality in our phones very, very soon.

If so, I wonder about battery power of these future devices. Cameras in phones seem to take up an awful lot of power - and increasing the quality will just make the phone even more power hungry. When is the next generation of batteries hitting the streets again?