It's that time of year again, when you need to decide if your current iPhone, that device you carry with you everywhere, has now become an outdated and oh-so-obsolete accessory. Never mind the fact that it's replaced your point-and-shoot as the device you take the most pictures with, the iPhone 5 is nearly upon us and it's got a greatly improved camera. But is it worth upgrading for?

Obviously, we haven't got our hands on one as it won't be released until September the 21st, but this is what we've been able to piece together from the various information Apple released.

Looking at the general specs, there's nothing different here compared to iPhone 4S: it's an 8 mega-pixel (MP) camera (3264x2448 pixels), with backside illumination, a hybrid IR filter, five-element lens and a f/2.4 aperture. In and of itself, it's remarkable that those specs are the same considering that this phone's camera housing is about 20% thinner than the previous model.

Some competing smartphones offer more MPs, so why would this 8MP one be better, at least on paper? Because the more pixels you have the more noise you can potentially get, and grabbing a sharp image depends a lot more on other factors, and this is where iPhone 5's camera shines.

New features include a Dynamic Low Light Mode which is able to combine multiple pixels together to greatly improve the quality of images taken in low-light conditions. This works in conjunction with the Spacial Noise Reduction which is part of the A6 chip's Image Signal Processor (ISP); according to Phil Schiller, "[it] removes the noisy particles, especially in low-light images, so by looking at surrounding pixels we can determine where the noise is and help remove that."

In addition, there's also a Smart Filter which figures out which areas should be uniform in color, like the sky, and which are areas of texture, which shouldn't have any noise reduction applied to.

On top of which, the five-element lens also received some attention, with the help of advanced alignment, designed to create sharper pictures and therefore yield higher quality results (this alignment is measured in the microns now, according to Apple). The optical system is capped by a sapphire crystal lens cover which is thinner and more durable than iPhone 4S' own cover.

The camera's video capabilities haven't been ignored with better image stabilization, as well as being able to take photos while shooting video - although these won't be at 8MP: the stills you take this way will be of HD video quality, i.e. only 2MP.

And if you ever thought that your iPhone 4S took too long to launch the Camera app, iPhone 5 is 40% faster, which should mean fewer lost opportunities.

What is possibly the camera's killer feature is actually not exclusive to iPhone 5, but will also be available for iPhone 4S and the 5th generation iPod touch when iOS6 is released: Panorama. With it you tap on the 'Panorama' button and, as Phill Schiller explained, "you hold your phone vertical to get the maximum area and then you just sweep your scene and the software tells you what pace to sweep it at to get the perfect image [...] Behind the scenes, in real time, while you’re panning, it’s taking slices of photos, finding the edges, stitching them together, creating seamless transitions between those photos for one beautiful panorama. It’s even able to determine a non-linear path through if you’re not perfectly stable, align it, and remove some of the echo artifacts you get if people or objects are moving while you’re trying to get that pan. This is truly breakthrough software for panorama photos."

So there you have it. If you've got an iPhone 4 or earlier, the improvements to the camera are undoubtably vast. If you take a lot of shots in low-light conditions, it certainly looks like iPhone 5 will offer many welcomed improvements, and the fast load time is definitely a plus. But because Panorama, distinctly the most amazing feature, will treacle down to iPhone 4S, it may be worth holding on to that one a little while longer, or at least wait until people start taking pictures with iPhone 5 so we can clearly compare both phones' quality and make an informed decision.