I last checked the Flickr camera statistics back in January 2008 and at the time, the Nokia N95 was the most used camera phone from which pictures were sent to Flickr, with the iPhone in hot pursuit. At some point in 2008, however, the iPhone has clearly surpassed the N95. While the graphs don't show absolute numbers the manufacturer statistics do and it's worth taking a look:
- From the Nokia N95, about 1100 users upload pictures daily. Whether that is directly from the phone or via a PC can't be seen. When taking the numbers of all Nokia models together, there are about 3500 users uploading pictures daily. The total number of pictures uploaded with the N95 is around 3.6 million.
- From iPhones (Flickr does not distinguish different models), there are about 3000 users that are uploading pictures daily. Again, it's not distinguishable if this is directly from the phone or via a PC. The total number of pictures taken with an iPhone and stored on Flickr is around 6 million these days.
Now let's compare that with the most popular non mobile phone camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XTi DSLR:
- From the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, there are about 6800 users that are uploading pictures daily. The total number of pictures on Flickr from that camera are 51 million, and one should probably also add the 60 million pictures taken with the Digital Rebel XT.
Sounds like a lot more!
But then, when looking at point and shoot cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, etc., the picture once again changes a bit. Even the Sony Cybershot DSC-W55 has 'only' 770 users uploading pictures daily. In all fairness, one should add the number of users uploading pictures for the other leading Sony cameras in the statistic and then compare that with the N95 and the iPhone. The numbers become quite equal then.
And again from a different perspective: When looking at 'all brands' sorted by most popular brands, Nokia is in 9th place, Sony Ericsson in 10th, and Apple beyond 30. Unfortunately, the statistics don't take into account how long a model has already been on the market (a disadvantage for Apple I suppose) and it's also not stated over which timeframe the numbers were summed up. It would be interesting to see the statistics over all cameras for 2008 only, I think they would look quite different. For the moment, however, I would say that 'stand alone' cameras are still more popular than mobile phones for pictures uploads to Flickr. Let's see how the statistics look a bit later in the year.