You know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s still a great, great camera for two reasons:

• apps (eg in-built editing)
• connectivity

Apps

There are loads of really great photo apps now available that make the general crappiness of the inbuilt camera work for you. My current favourites include:

Lo-mob (£1.19)

My newest find, but also my best. The app let you apply a couple of dozen effects like a through the viewfinder look, vintage Polaroid or, as below, 35mm shot in a medium format camera:

ShakeitPhoto (£0.59)

The best fake-Polaroid app out there, for my money. The piece de resistance is that when you shake the iPhone, the picture develops before your eyes, which never gets old.

Best Camera, CameraBag and PerfectPhoto are all worth a look too. They all offer a different look and it’s worth experimenting with them to see which you’d want to use in different situations.

Connectivity

Take the photo, drop it into an app to get the look you want and email it to your friends, or for wider impact, Posterous (which’ll autopost up to Flickr, Twitter, etc.). Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded, but this still seems amazing to me. I know MMS has been around for ages so we’ve been able to send photos to each other over the air for a while, but it wasn’t until devices like the iPhone came about that we reached a tipping point in ease of use.

Now I suppose other smartphones have similar levels of connectivity, but with them you’re stuck with the normal badly exposed, grainy shots you just took. Combine the iPhone’s connectivity with its ability to actually produce worthwhile material and you’re onto a real winner.

Here are a few that stand out from the crowd.

Evernote

Good note-taking app, let down by being a bit clunky in use and being very slow at times. Still pretty much indispensable though, especially for cross-platform syncing.

Twitterific

I tried Twitterfon and iTwitter (whose push notifications failed to work for me), but settled for Twitterific, mainly because the tweets were easiest to read.

WordPress

Lets me update this blog from my iPhone. Enough said really. Has the important feature of being able to edit the HTML of posts, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Oblique Strategies

Important for those creative impasses.

ToDo

I needed something that would help me get my tasks in order. There are several alternatives, but ToDo seemed to me to have the best integration with online services and the most useable interface. It did however cost £5.99, which is in the big-league for this kind of app and certainly about the most I’d pay.

Remote

Let’s me control iTunes from anywhere in the house. As soon as I figure out how to run iTunes through my main stereo, my life will be complete (and I’ll have almost completely negated any need for CDs).

Flixster

I use it mainly because you can group local cinemas together and get easy access to show times.

Shazam

Free iPhone version of the awesome song-naming text service. Works every time.

Let me test – the too-loud music playing in the cafe at the moment is… Love Scenes by The Jackson 5. I wish people would give the Jackson tributes a rest.

PrezofUSA

I love the Presidents of the USA. Great band, reasonably good app. It allows you to stream most of their back catalogue, including some really rare material. Not bad for £1.79 although you need to buy the songs if you want to listen offline (all available through an iTunes link in the app).

CameraBag

Not-very-customisable but pretty good app for adding effects to your photos. It includes Holga, Lomo, 60s, 70s and Polaroid effects (all named something slightlydifferent – Helga, for example – presumably to get around copyright concerns.

Mobile blogging

For blogging purposes, although the WordPress app is handy, I’ve not used it much as I prefer to write and edit using a larger keyboard and screen.

Far more suited to the iPhone is Posterous, a blogging service designed around email. As so much of the multimedia on the iPhone is shareable by email, this is tremendously handy. Posterous handles all the format conversion you need, even creating galleries from multi-photo emails, and will autopost to almost every service you could want (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook etc etc).