Alice Camera is a clever blend of AI, high-quality optics, and smartphone intelligence

For spontaneous photography, the best camera for the job is the one you happen to be holding. For the overwhelming majority of casual photographers, that camera is the one in your smartphone. The very first cameras appeared on commercial mobile phones around the turn of the century (although as ever with tech milestones, there are multiple claims to the title of pioneer). The early work of companies like Kyocera, Motorola, Samsung, and even Apple, opened the floodgates to what is now best called'computational photography'; relatively small sensors and lenses, paired with massively sophisticated algorithms and processing to deliver the kind of images that even the best DSLR cameras would struggle to match. One company believes that mobile photography could be better.