These are my favorite camera phones from the past 25 years

It’s been 25 years since Samsung launched the SCH-V200, which contentiously claims the title of the first camera phone (the Sharp J-SH04 also has its eye on the prize). It certainly wasn’t anything like the photography behemoths we carry around in our pockets today — just a tiny 0.35MP rear camera with storage for 20 photos at a time. Compare that to today’s best camera phones with 200 megapixels, 1-inch image sensors, and quadruple lens arrays, and it’s hard not to feel a little old.

There have been plenty of brilliant camera phones over the past two and a half decades. So, to mark 25 years since the SCH-V200 (whether or not it truly was the first), I thought I’d take a stroll down memory lane with a few of my personal favorites.

I’m dating myself here, but before Android was a thing, I bought a Sony Ericsson K750i on what felt like an outrageously expensive contract (honestly, who lets teenagers sign phone contracts?). Back in 2005, I had no idea I was buying into a sleeper hit. The K750i was a massive success for Sony, thanks largely to its groundbreaking camera. It packed a 2MP shooter with dual LED flash — trust me, that was impressive at the time. Most phones topped out at 0.3MP VGA sensors.

By today’s standards, the specs are meager, but Sony and consumers like me saw it as a game-changer. It had a retractable lens cover (I can still hear that satisfying snap), a dedicated shutter button, and a volume rocker that doubled as a zoom control. It was built to feel like a tiny camera you could keep in your pocket.

The K750i is often overlooked in early smartphone camera discussions, but it laid the groundwork for the K850i, which upped the ante with a 5MP sensor, proper Xenon flash, and a more camera-centric interface. It also paved the way for Sony Ericsson’s Cyber-shot phones, which aimed to fuse Sony’s point-and-shoot camera chops with mobile tech. Sony’s Xperia phones carry on that same legacy.

The K750i might not have been the first or the most memorable, but for me at least, it was my first taste of a phone that put the camera front and center, and I haven’t looked back.

This one’s on my list reluctantly, mostly because I didn’t use early iPhones myself. And honestly, even the many premium iPhones I’ve tried since wouldn’t crack my personal top 10. Still, credit where it’s due: Apple has played a massive role in shaping camera phone culture, not always by pushing tech boundaries, but by giving mobile photography its mainstream appeal. Who doesn’t love social media, after all?

The iPhone 4 is where that transformation began.

With a decent 5MP BSI sensor, 720p video recording, LED flash, and a front-facing camera, the iPhone 4 had a solid, if not spectacular, hardware setup. But it was the software and ecosystem that elevated the experience. It made photo and video sharing not just easy, but inevitable.

FaceTime introduced millions to video calling — arguably paving the way for vlogging culture. Instagram launched the same year, giving people a reason to share their iPhone photos. iOS 4 bundled in photo albums, geotagging, iCloud backup, and even iMovie for on-device video editing. Looking back, it’s hard to remember a time when those weren’t standard.

From a pure photography standpoint, it wasn’t groundbreaking, but the iPhone 4 is the godfather of the modern mobile photography experience.

However, I spent this era with the superb Samsung Galaxy S2. It launched a year later with an 8MP camera and 1080p video capabilities, putting Android on the multimedia map too. I loved mine, though I remember it more as a solid all-rounder than a photography beast. Still, the S2 arguably marked a turning point for Android imaging and the platform’s broader success, much like the iPhone 4 did for Apple.

Fast forward to the real heavy-hitters. In its heyday, Nokia was the mobile brand to beat when it came to imaging, pushing boundaries all the way back to the 2007 Nokia N95.

Although I never owned one, 2012’s PureView 808 left a lasting impression. It debuted Nokia’s PureView pixel oversampling tech, which shrank massive 41MP images into lossless zoom or detailed low-res versions — effectively giving you the best of both worlds. Today’s high-res, pixel-binning sensors owe a lot to this idea, albeit now done in hardware.

The phone’s 1/1.2-inch sensor was huge — even by today’s standards — and paired with an f/2.4 lens, it could still hold its own in some respects. Sadly, the 808’s Symbian OS was already being outshone by the burgeoning app ecosystems on iOS and Android. Nokia was hedging its bets with Microsoft’s ill-fated Windows Phone OS, and 2012’s Nokia Lumia 920 continued to review reasonably well.

By 2013, Nokia had shifted gears to the Lumia 1020. It reprised a 41MP sensor, added a faster f/2.2 lens co-developed with ZEISS, and launched with an optional camera grip accessory. It even supported RAW capture via a later update — a feature that Apple and Android phones wouldn’t adopt for years. While plenty of camera phones existed before it, the 1020 was one of the last before a relative lull in all-out enthusiast-tier camera phones.

I still have my canary yellow 1020 tucked away. I pulled it out five years after launch, and it still held its own against phones that had only just caught up in megapixel count. Sure, today’s flagships blow it out of the water in dynamic range and detail, but that soft, natural image quality still holds a nostalgic charm of a simpler time. I’ll be keeping hold of this one, it’s a classic.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when smartphones became true camera replacements, but the 2017–2019 window feels about right. That’s when phone cameras went from “good enough” to “why bother with a point-and-shoot?” For me, the HUAWEI P20 Pro is the standout model that encapsulates this most exciting period in mobile photography.

For starters, it was the first phone with a triple camera setup: a 40MP main shooter, an 8MP 3x telephoto, and a 20MP monochrome sensor used for image fusion. The photos? Spectacular for the time.

While the processing looks heavy-handed now, the P20 Pro kicked off HUAWEI’s golden era. The P30 Pro was even better, and the Mate series was highly regarded too, but it was the P20 Pro that started the magic.

The P20 Pro also debuted a proper night mode, multi-frame HDR, software-controlled aperture bokeh, hybrid zoom, and even 960fps slow-motion video, providing a level of versatility I hadn’t experienced before. Others were working on similar features, but HUAWEI was the first to bundle them all into a flagship package that looked brilliant too. Or maybe it was just me who was persuaded to part with their cash.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if someone revisited the monochrome fusion concept today, especially given how ultrawide lenses have started to feel redundant with the rise of 23mm main sensors. This reminds me, I need to take more moody black-and-white photos for my library.

Yes, I could’ve mentioned the Pixel lineup much earlier — Google was pioneering HDR+ and computational photography long before 2021 — but it always felt like clever software making up for outdated hardware. That changed with the Pixel 6 Pro.

Google finally joined the big leagues with a 50MP 1/1.31-inch sensor, a 48MP 4x telephoto, and a 12MP ultrawide. HDR+, Super Res Zoom, and Night Sight were all tried and tested at this point, but felt renewed with powerful hardware to back them up. I was particularly blown away by the telephoto lens, which actually produced photos as good as the main sensor — a rarity even now. Despite other review units landing on my desk, I stuck with the phone for a couple of years and barely took a bad picture with it in that time.

The Pixel 6 Pro also marked a turning point for Google’s camera ambitions. It was when the Pixel finally became a top-tier camera phone and premiered the now-iconic Pixel camera bar. But with that new hardware came computational photography tools like Magic Eraser, Face Unblur, and Real Tone, which have since expanded into an entire AI suite that encompasses Magic Editor, Add Me, Video Boost, and a ton of other extras. Features that were once Pixel exclusives are now being copied left and right.

If I had to choose one older phone camera to use today, it would be the Pixel 6 Pro.

Looking back, I’ve been lucky to use and even own some of the most iconic camera phones of all time — some intentionally, some by accident. I’ve seen the evolution from barely a megapixel to today’s quad-lens phenomenons.

Today’s flagship phones — like the Google Pixel 9 Pro and Xiaomi 15 Ultra — are undeniably impressive, even compared to models from just a handful of years ago. So much so that they’ve left my beloved Fuji mirrorless collecting dust on the shelf. From today’s huge sensors and multiple lenses to shooting tricks and editing tools, no other part of the smartphone has advanced quite as dramatically in the past 25 years as the camera.

Of course, I can’t mention every great camera phone without turning this into a small book. The HTC One M7 and its “Ultrapixel” gamble, the LG G2/G3 and their laser autofocus, the ASUS Zenfone 6’s rotating front/back camera, and Sony’s Xperia line (especially the Pro-I) deserve a mention too. In fact, the G3 remains one of my all-time favorite Android phones, thermal throttling and all.

But now it’s your turn: did I miss your favorite camera phone of all time? Drop it in the comments — I’m always keen to reminisce.