Technofile: Everywhere you look these days are cameras. Cameras on the roads. Cameras in the shopping centre. Cameras on the front of your computer. Cameras on mobile phones.

And it's the latter that is having the biggest impact on what now seems faintly antiquated to call photography.

These days, when a celebrity falls out of their hotel room, or turns up at a movie premiere, alongside the flash-gun staccato of the professional paparazzi will be hundreds of screaming fans, all holding their mobile phones aloft.

And the movement has obviously not gone unnoticed inside the photo industry.

Aside from cutting their operations to the bone and closing old-fashioned acetate film factories, Kodak has been investing in new devices such as stand-alone black boxes that are popping up at the odd camera shop and pharmacy, at which you can print out your digital camera and mobile phone pictures.

And now with new camera phones offering as much as a megapixels' worth of definition, I too am on the verge of throwing away the old digital camera I bought back when it was the cutting edge of technology, only three years ago.

One of the latest camera phones on the market is the Siemens S65. It's stealth-fighter looks belie a workhorse of a phone that has a full suite of business software. It will synchronise with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes via its built-in Bluetooth.

Usefully, it is one of the first of a new wave of business-oriented mobile phones that license the Blackberry wireless email system.

This synchronises your email between phone and desktop PC, so you don't have to work laboriously through your email twice over when back in the office.

But perhaps one of the main reasons for looking at this phone is its integrated 1.3 megapixel camera. This is just a stepping stone, but with this improved photographic power at your disposal, it's slowly becoming possible to use such devices as semi-serious cameras.

Sporting a satisfyingly large and bright colour screen and 32MB of memory, the S65 can shoot still and video images, the latter at up to 15 frames per second. You can then move images - either via the 32MB compact multimedia card or via the built-in Bluetooth wireless transmitter - to your PC.

Megapixel phones like the S65 look like having a fundamental affect on the camera industry.

Samsung Electronics thinks the idea of owning a camera will be an obsolete idea in a couple of years.

And to help that along, it recently unveiled the first five megapixel cell phone in the highly "digital-friendly" market of South Korea. The SCH-S250 sports a screen that can display 16 million colours, hold 92MB of on-board RAM, record up to 100 minutes of video and play MP3s and games. It won't make tea, but you get the drift.

So those who just want a way to take basic, decent-quality snapshots that can be printed out on a home inkjet printer can now start thinking seriously about just using camera phones.

Much like those who used instamatic 126 and 110 film cameras in the 1970s and 1980s. But of course, there'll be no room for nostalgia for those throwaway flashcubes. The photographers of tomorrow may only have heard of mobile phones.

Mike Butcher edits mbites.com