Good phone or good camera - or both?

I have a great digital camera. My 7.2 megapixel SONY DSC H5 is now 2 years old. I have a 2GB Memory stick in it. The battery usually goes flat before I'm able to fill it.

My problem is, if I use this camera, I either carry my laptop around with me, or I can't do anything with the images until I get them home. All kitted up, with camera bag and laptop backpack, I look I'm about to make an assault on Everest. I then have to make time to manage / handle / share whatever images I took.The battery life of the big camera is poor. The special SONY AA NiMH batteries last barely 30 minutes if you use the LCD display. As they age, they last a fraction of that. This means you have to carry a camera bag around with plenty of batteries in it. Cumbersome, annoying and awkward in actual use.

Increasingly, I find myself opting, instead, for the 1.3megapixel camera in my very 'inexpensive' Vodafone 715 3G cell phone. With the cell phone, it sits in my pocket, the battery lasts all day and I can send the pics via email or pxt to anyone, anywhere, immediately after taking them. I can upload videos on YouTube and share photos with my 300+ followers on Twitter via Twitpic.com.

For the reasons above, the large SONY H5 digital camera is rarely getting an outing these days even though the picture quality of the cell phone is not very good. In a way, it seems like a challenge to see if I can get something good out of the crappy camera on the cell. The poor quality can even lend a sense of immediacy to the photos distorted as they often are by motion, light artifacts and blurring due to fingerprints on the lens. I think I often succeed there. Have a look for yourself.

There is a growing number of phones that can do WiFi, but from what I can see so far, they tend to be like the SONY DSC-G3, or the Kodak EasyShare camera, tied, at least in part, to the vendor's web site and software.

The advantage of the cell phone cameras is they aren't tied to anyone (as cameras) and I can send whatever I want to anywhere. Of course the downside is crappy lenses and relatively poor image quality. But .....even at 1.3megapixels, 99 times out of 100 lately that has been good enough.
Good enough. Dangerous words in any market for people selling things that aren't....or are too good.

Unless digital camera makes do something amazing in the very near future, like make a camera that can connect to a cell phone or act like one, it looks very much like my next camera will be a high-end smart phone that costs about the same as my last digital camera. A year from now, new product offerings, like the ACER Tempo DX900, Nokia Nseries, HTC Magic and the new iPhones in the mobile market will have a huge impact on the camera market, too. At least for people like me who want their camera in their pocket, a battery that lasts all day and their pics on the Net seconds or minutes after they were taken.