For camera buffs out there, the cream of the crop is still the Nokia N8, though we understand why you’d want to avoid it since it’s running an ancient, almost impossible to use operating system. The Samsung Galaxy S II is also impressive, but it comes in third place behind the iPhone 4S, which is not only amazing, but also has a wide range of image editing and sharing applications available in the App Store. Now those rankings can radically change, and likely will over the next 2 months as CES and MWC kick off in January and February respectively. We’re expecting to see the Samsung Galaxy S III, the Nokia Lumia 900, and who knows what HTC has up their sleeve. We hope that someone, likely Samsung, will make use of this Sharp camera module, and hey, you never know, it might show up in the next iPhone!

For the folks who take photo taking seriously, what smartphone do you use? And for those of you who could care less about taking pictures, if your camera was better would you actually take more photos?

Now we know what you’re thinking, when will American and European smartphones get this thing? We wouldn’t be surprised to see 12 megapixels becoming the baseline for high end smartphones during 2012, which would mean that the 5th generation iPhone may very well pack this improved component. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is just 40 days away, and then a month after that is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If we don’t see 12 megapixel smartphones at either of these two events, then we’ll be let down. Before the camera snobs chime in, yes we know that the optics are more important than the actual camera itself, but there’s only so much glass you can shove into the back of smartphone before it simply gets unwieldily. Just look at the Nokia N8.

Equally as important as the camera module or the optics is the image processing software. That’s something Apple and Nokia have nearly perfected, something that Samsung is quickly catching up on, and the rest of the industry just disappoints. What do you think will be the imaging flagship of 2012?

By the looks of things, RIM could score higher in future report cards simply by disclosing more of what it’s doing in particular fields, but as is, this is yet another PR headache BlackBerry could do without. RIM already has investors breathing down their neck for a BlackBerry that doesn’t look like the same thing they launched three years ago, and they’re still doling out free apps for the massive service outage a few weeks ago – do they really need eco-activists picketing the brand too?

You can read up on RIM’s Greenpeace report card over here, or see how the rest of the manufacturers did here.