The Death of Point-and-Shoots

I love my Nexus S, I really do. It is running pure Android 2.3 (ICS on the way), it has a decent processor, the screen is 4" (0.5" bigger than the iPhone) and I love the camera...so much that I have hardly used my 14 MP Sony point-and-shoot in the past 4 months.

Why do I love the camera so much? Even though it is only 5 MP, it takes good photos and avoids a lot of the hassle with point-and-shoots:

1. Geotagging: As long as the my phone's gps is turned on, photos are automatically geotagged, and the accuracy is pretty good. With the point-and-shoot, I have to manually add the gps information with software that often crashes.
2. Uploading: Android allows easy uploading to major photo sharing sites. I am a diehard Picassa web album user, to upload I simply select the photos and the album to upload to. For the point-and-shoot, I have to transfer them to my computer via a usb cable, then upload them to Picasa web albums. I hate having to deal with wires.
3. One Less Device: Back in the day I rocked a dumbphone and iPod Touch. Like a lot of people I have ditched the iPod Touch and dumbphone, and use just the smartphone. Using the smartphone as my primary camera is another step in the direction of using just one device. Before the smartphone age, people would whip out their point-and-shoot to grab a photo, take out the dumbphone to make a call; now they simply whip out their smartphone. Flickr numbers provide evidence for this, the iPhone is the most popular camera used (and yes, I admit that the iPhone does have a great camera) and I suspect other phones are playing catch-up. 

Photographers out there will never move in this direction, and most probably don't use a point-and-shoot, they will stick with their SLR or DSR or whatever it is called. The average user is ditching their point and shoot for their smartphone and I expect the rate of this will increase. Instead of users upgrading their camera, they will upgrade their phone (8 MP cameras and higher are very common in smarthphones these days). I know I will be doing this come October.

Finally, here is the same beautiful Newfoundland scene taken with my Sony point-and-shoot and my Nexus S, I am not sure which device took which photo, for me and the average user it doesn't matter.