The camera phone spelled the end for the digital camera. That’s what they told us. But no, it wasn’t true, because the cameras in camera phones have generally always been pretty useless regardless of how many megapixels they had wodged into them. But is that all about to change with the new LG Viewty Smart, a handset that’s as much a camera as it is a phone.

The eight megapixel snapper/phone comes wielding auto focus, smile and face detection, geo-tagging, and in-phone editing.

LG’s impressive S-Class UI make a welcome reappearance on the Viewty along with a veritable smorgasbord of connectivity options, minus 3G, which might make viewing web-pages a ball-ache, especially if you can’t get an EDGE signal either. Quaintly it also has FM radio, which I actually really like, a lot, because radio is still ace.

Available soon, on Orange initially, and then across the networks thereafter.