You are kind of contradicting yourself. Like you mention, users don't care about what upstream distro their's is based on. But they do care about automatic codec installation which is a non-trivial thing for a newbie...just look it up on *any* distros forum. The article (can you call an opinion piece in a reputed magazine, a rant?) argues that mainstream distros are more focussed towards making Linux legally correct. Still, they aren't completely useless because they do invest in advancing the desktop. Just that the author would rather recommend one-man distros.

Like someone pointed out, a camera, of any MP, is limited by the fact that it is in a phone -- a device with limited resources. You need to understand what you are playing with. Some phones like the Nokia N90, have Carl Zeiss lens, but still the images aren't comparable to a dedicated camera. A good photograph is influenced by a lot of things apart from the lens -- white balance and shooting mode could do wonders. I have seen that my K750i takes awesome macro shots [see for yourself here: http://www.geekybodhi.net/gallery2/ ], but it sucks when there's any kind of motion. Then there is also the ability to control the shutter speed. I haven't seen a phone camera that allows for manual adjustment of the speed of the shutter, but it can be done by using the Night Mode many phones have, which slows shutter sync; alas, this also means that they become over sensitive to any vibration and pick up a lot of noise.

A few pics in a couple of months with an article deadline isn't doing justice to the the hardware. Camera phones are good, no doubt. But you need to spend time to understand what they can do and can't do, before jumping to conclusions. Camera phones are all about getting close to the subject. Once you understand that, working with them is a charm.