These are my favourite camera phones from the past 25 years

Do you still remember your first camera phone? Here's how far we've come.

Jun 1, 2025 - 16:40

These are my favourite camera phones from the past 25 years

Credit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority

It’s been 25 years since Samsung launched the SCH-V200, which contentiously claims the title of the first camera phone (the Sharp J-SH04 also has its eye on the prize). It certainly wasn’t anything like the photography behemoths we carry around in our pockets today — just a tiny 0.35MP rear camera with storage for 20 photos at a time. Compare that to today’s best camera phones with 200 megapixels, 1-inch image sensors, and quadruple lens arrays, and it’s hard not to feel a little old.

There have been plenty of brilliant camera phones over the past two and a half decades. So, to mark 25 years since the SCH-V200 (whether or not it truly was the first), I thought I’d take a stroll down memory lane with a few of my personal favorites.