What is your smartphone camera of choice?

I have two pixel 8 pro's coming for DW and I. She's a little reluctant to leave the iOS sphere. I am happy to do so. I said, my iPhone 13 will be my last iPhone. I am holding to it. We have been using iPhones since the 4s with a little stint in between with the windows mobile devices (which I loved). Got the 6s, 8, 11, and now the 13. Nothing has been really new or WOW for us. It's the same regurgitated phone with little things done to make it "ALL NEW".

With the pixel 8 pro, we get great AI features for everyday life like call screening, recorder summarize (awesome for DW's long droning on meetings she has to take minutes for), and a host of other awesomeness. The option to make our home screens, icons, etc look the way WE want is a nice feature too. I am artsy and creative so I like switching up the look of things frequently. On iPhone, You have to jump through 11 rings of hell to do it and it takes HOURS as well. One flick of a button on the Pixel (or any android device), you have a fresh new phone look to keep you wanting to use it.

There are alot of other reasons as well, like better interoperability with our computers, tablet etc as well.

I would take Maxtech videos with a huge grain of salt. The pixel 7 pro has a much better zoom camera than the 14 pro max. I think they got too close to the gecko or focused on something else. They are apple fanboys to the nth degree and will do anything to make apple come out on top however they can. NOT a great video to use for an unbiased view.

Well, I got two pixel 8 pros for my wife and I, I am waiting for the s23 ultra to drop in price on the refurb market and I will be adding one of those to the stable. Thirdly, I have removed all apple devices save for my iPad which I just bought out of the stable. We are done with the locked down ways of apple and their shenanigans.

I agree. I don't like the Apple walled garden. I want to put stuff where I want to, not where Apple insists.

I have an Android phone (OnePlus 8) - android does two things that Apple can't.

When I enter my house, the phone connects to the Wifi - that triggers a phone call to my service provider to divert all calls to my house phone. That way, I can pick up calls no matter where in the house I am (we have 7 phones scattered around the house).

The other thing is that anytime I get a text, it automatically forward that on as an email. Which helps with 2FA when the bank wants to text me a number and I am at the other end of the house on my PC trying to log in.

IOS can't do either of those (or if it can, I have no idea how).

As for cameras (the original discussion), no - I don't use my smartphone as a camera if I can help it. It's great for 'snaps', but I prefer something that looks like a camera and feels like a camera.

I use the cameras on our phones quite a bit, as a convenience when we are travelling. The images are quite good for blogging, insta stuff and what not. They fall apart when you use them for other things. But for our content creation they can work fine. I have a gimbal, camera grip etc for them. So we have one setup in a gimbal and the other in the grip. We use them in a run and gun setup.
When I want to take serious images. Nothing beats real cameras. NOTHING.

I am going to circle around this statement. Since learning my Pixel 8 pro and using it for a few months now. I can say this statement is completely wrong. My son graduated high school this past week. My brother's son also graduated at the same time. He was using a Canon T3 to take his photos, and my wife and I were using our Pixel 8 Pros. Our photos were better outside, inside, in the dark gymnasium etc. We compared images from the Gym and mine were bright, clear and sharp, his were either extremely dark, poorly autofocused, or if he used the flash the subject was blown out and overexposed and the rest of the scene was black.

With our phones in 50mp mode, they produced WAY BETTER photos than the Canon. It surprised the crap out of me. Pixel peep my photos they retain sharpness, detail etc without any of the watercolor effect so prominent in phone photography from other brands. I was blown away. My iPhone 13 was pure junk when it came to imaging other than for instabook stuff.

Here is one shot from inside the gym. No flash, etc. The only lighting was the string lights throughout the gym.

Sure, it's a good photograph. Turn the lights off until there are just a few little lights on and take the same photo.

Short focal length (24mm eq), which results in wideangle perspective 'distortion'. Nowadays people are used to that, half of mobile images look this way :)
Look at this image from distance say 5cm (I know, you can't; it also depends on image size) and there's no distortion visible.