[hakfoo]

There was probably an exit ramp for some of the smaller camera makers in the consulting/branding game. Once camera phones became good enough people might willingly use them, there was an opportunity to position yourself as "the phone with real camera expertise behind it". Send over a few engineers and optics experts to the phone manufacturer, develop some co-branded apps, and bingo, the new Xiaomi P300 Presented By Minolta.

I know there were occasional "camera first" designs (the Lumia 1020 comes to mind) but they tended to be creamed on the market for reasons other than the camera factor. Modern phones are a study in "okay, you compensated for mediocre optical components with a lot of software", so I have to wonder what we'd get if we combined them with inherently better optics.

I'd think the possible targets here would have been the "second tier" camera brands that had narrower product lines and less distribution, but decent brand recognition. It didn't matter if you were cut out of the point-and-shoot market if nobody was buying your point-and-shoot cameras in the first place.

Did the camera firms themselves reject the concept of slumming with VGA sensors and plastic lenses, or was there just no percieved market?