How easy to lose sight of what photography actually is.
Or medium format, for that matter.
Rob
Rob,
This is the beginning of small-sensor computational photography, not the end.
And in fact stand-alone non-connected cameras seem to be going the way of film, with 99% of the world's pictures now being made on phones.
Maybe you never used dSLRS? There were a few small ones, and then some experiments and special models based on Kodak backs, and then there was the Nikon D1 and the Canon 1D and then the spectacular 1Ds which by using a fullframe sensor made a camera which is basically still current. Tethered Phase backs stuck on the back of a mechanical Hassy made superb pictures even back then, but it was those first Nikons and Canons which anybody with a laptop could use that changed the photography world.
In this sense, it looks like the phones are now the first mass-produced items of a new type of multiple-sensor high-compute photo tech, which can eg. overlay images for more rez and DR, assemble 3D models from motion capture, and compute depth maps and extract subjects from the background.
The phones show us how we will be able to do 3D photoshop retouching -change a nose shape here, a foot position there, all the way to dropping a different model into a background, or even putting a computed model into that background - exactly like car photographers are doing today, in a very specialised way. But they will also soon be able to load the model of the person up on the net - or retrieve it on the fly.
Rob, the phones are THE MOST ADVANCED COMPUTERS a normal person can buy, and the camera modules are the most expensive single item on the phone bill-of-materials because THE PHONE IS THE CAMERA WHICH ALL THE KIDS USE.
The electronics revolution brought us the Autofocus motor-driven auto-exposure film SLR, then the PC revolution brought us electronic imaging, but that was just the first chapter of the camera's evolution. The current chapter is being written by phone tech.
The phones aren't "comparable" to dSLRs, they have decisively moved ahead of them, in the same way a Nikon D1 had moved resolutely beyond the F4. Image quality is not yet there but the all-round capabilities are becoming much greater.
I was in the park yesterday with my kid. Next to me on the bench a pretty and heavily made-up au pair in a dress spent twenty minutes tossing her hair, and capturing her face with her phone. She didn't need a photographer, nor even a camera. If I were snarky I'd say that all she really needed in life was herself. Selfies have become a major obsession, and it's all due to the phone.
Edmund