Wouldn’t it be cool if our smartphone cameras could perform more photography-related functions? Right now our smartphone cameras can take photos normally or zoom in, and that’s pretty much it. If you wanted a wide-angle shot, a macro shot, or an even longer zoom shot, you’d have to buy third party accessories like the Olloclip that is basically an external camera lens that you can attach to your smartphone. Alternative you could always go for Sony’s offering in the form of the QX10 and the QX100 which are admittedly more expensive and bulky, although with much better optics.
In any case it looks like Apple might have thought of something similar as they have recently been granted patents for different methods of attaching different camera lenses onto their iPhone devices. In the first patent, it talks about a removable camera in which users will be able to remove certain components and attach different lenses to it, such as a wide-angle lens, for example. It has also been suggested that more complicated electronic components could be attached to provide optical zoom, mechanical shutter functions, and even optical image stabilization.
The second function is more or less the same as the first, but the main difference is that it talks about external attachments to the iPhone’s body, rather than removable components. This is thanks to an alignment feature that would be built into the iPhone’s body that would allow a separate module to be attached that would line up with the system’s optical axis. Through this separate lenses can be attached to the phone and it could also be one of the features that third-party manufacturers can take advantage of. There’s no telling when Apple will realize this patent but what do you guys think?
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