Well, you never know what Apple might come up with.
If they managed to utilize independent lens and sensors to create a single image, for example using 2 1/3 inch sensors (basically two of the ones used in current gen iphones), it should be technically better than a point and shoot with small aperture (which usually sports a 2/3 inch sensor) because it uses 2 lenses for more light exposure.
Ugh. Smartphone picture quality is limited by physics and geometry. Not even Apple has magic which can counter those.
DLSR photos are higher quality because the sensor is a lot bigger. That means each photocell is bigger. That means when you open the shutter to snap the picture, each pixel gets hit by more light, which means a more accurate and less noisy image.
DSLR lenses are big because when you make the sensor bigger, you have to increase the focal length of the lens in order to capture the same field of view. The field of view captured by a 28mm lens on a full-frame DSLR sensor is the same as 3.9mm lens on a 1/3" sensor.
You can't put a longer focal length lens on a phone camera because it's so thin to begin with. The focal length is the distance from the center of the lens to the sensor plane. This is simple geometry. The three ways to get a longer focal length into a shorter distance between lens and sensor.
- Using a parafocal design. But those just shift the problem from after the lens to before it. The lens ends up being bigger in front than a normal lens design.
- Folding the light path with mirrors. This has been used on some point and shoot cameras. A 45 degree mirror or prism under the lens redirects the light, so the sensor sits at 90 degrees to the lens. Unfortunately, the sensor size then ends up being the limiting factor - a 1/3" sensor is 3.6mm in its shortest dimension. So there's no way to get a much bigger sensor into the current crop of 6-8mm phones.
- Using a light field camera (i.e. no lens). Unfortunately these are still in the early stages and probably won't be competitive with optical lens designs for another 10-20 years.
Putting two lenses and two sensors can in theory help, but combining the images from two lenses introduces parallax errors. If the lenses are mounted 4mm apart (pretty much the minimum for a 1/3" sensor), and your photos are, say, 12MP, that means in any picture with field of view less than 16 meters, there's a 1 pixel or greater offset between what the images the two sensors record. You can't combine them with a simple add and combine operation - that would actually make the pictures blurrier (this is in fact exactly what causes depth of field blur in regular photos - the large surface area of the lens means all the light from an object by the lens doesn't focus onto the same pixels).
3CCD video cameras get around this problem by splitting the light from the same lens onto 3 sensors. But that defeats the whole reason for doing this - getting more light onto the sensors. You'd just be splitting the light which used to fall on one sensor to fall upon two.
P&S and phone camera picture quality has been improving because of one thing - sensor technology has constantly improved and each year so a same-size photocell can produce a cleaner image using less light. The physics and geometry of the light and lenses has remained unchanged since the earliest photos in the 1800s. As gggplaya said, anyone who thinks you can get around these limits by playing with lenses is ignorant of photography.
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