A brief history on some of the most innovative camera centric phones

If Mobile World Congress 2018 showed us anything, it's that there's still a lot of innovation surrounding the cameras in our mobile devices. The Samsung Galaxy S9 might've have been regarded as an incremental upgrade, but its camera's variable aperture is something unseen before that should help its sensor to gather in more light, for a better low-light performance. Meanwhile, the Sony Xperia XZ2 tackles the other end of the spectrum with video centric features – like its incredible slow-motion footage capture at 960 FPS in 1080p and 4K HDR recording.

These are just a few of the innovations we saw introduced at this year's Mobile World Congress, showing us exactly that there's still a ton of buzz and excitement when it comes to cameras. That honestly shouldn't surprise anyone, seeing that it's a feature that most users would proclaim as being one of the most important in a phone. While these are just two of the latest innovations in the space, there have been many other innovations in the past that paved the way for them.

In this piece, we're going back down memory lane to uncover some of the most innovative camera centric phones that pushed the limits. The list below is arranged in chronological order, to better provide oversight in the chain of events that allowed these camera innovations to flourish and become reality. Just to think, there was a time when phones were just phones – without cameras of course. Try to imagine that nowadays, it's almost unbelievable to imagine that was the case during the early years.