"Just a week after strong cameraphone sales figures were announced, Sony Ericsson's president says its parent has ceded the low-end camera market to mobile phones. Sony Ericsson president Katsumi Ihara says that Sony has given up the low-end digital camera market to cameraphones. While last week's sales figures showed that cameraphones outsold digital cameras nearly 2-to-1 in 2003, this is the first concrete statement from a vendor that the inevitable is beginning."
This is not very surprising news if you think about it. It just doesn't make sense for Sony, a digital imaging giant, to make a piece of hardware that is soon going to be outdated even in camera phones. Camera phones have already made a huge dent in the low megapixel digital camera market and with camera phones set to take 1- to 2-megapixel pictures by next year, I doubt whether anyone will be buying digital cameras that exclusively take low resolution pictures.