How long does it take to modify SFOS for the new phone? Have you asked licensing from Jolla? Phone without OS is like having a brick.

...and maybe, by the time Chen starts designing his next phone, light field module will become possible on smartphones.

exactly, Jolla aren't exactly big enough to get a few people on the device to release it by the end of the year.

As stated before Jolla is probobly not even aware of what have to be done, much less planning for it. Its unfortunately very little gain for Jolla so as I stated before. This will take years to get a consumer product ready. The best we can hope for is that some coding ninjas appear with access to sailfish source.

That said, end of year might be a great goal for Chen with the hw, but to me it's just a checkpoint.

That said Is nothing bad that it takes time, Its just too much to do with too few people.

Just look at qwerty for moto. It takes time. Then add the complexity of a total design of a working phone with additional sw and it obvious. Nothing bad. It just takes time.

I would say 6 months once Jolla get their hands on the device.

What to base that assumption on?

True. Xenon can deliver way more light and in the process over expose the closest object and leave the background almost completely without the details.
Every built in flash on any camera is equally crappy and useless as those on the phones. The same goes for a very bright sunny day. To much light is almost as bad as not enough light.
Bigger sensors with bigger pixels on the other hand do wonders. Add a tripod and long exposure and than we have something.
Every sensor in every phone is simply phisically not big enough for some quality photos. Taking pictures when there's not enough light is one problem. The other one is the perception of the whole scene. It's OK when taking pictures of something close but in any other case picture always look "flat".

I seem to remember when sailfish was first announced, they claimed to be able to port it to various devices 'overnight'

Let me jump into sensor size/MP discussion.

I don't know what is these days used in the phone cameras, but I expect it to be CMOS and a rather small one.

The cameras are having usually problems with lower light conditions, so let's focus on this case. Assuming that we have the same size of the sensor (CMOS or CCD chip), the larger size of a single pixel will lead to larger signal-to-noise ratio. This is due to a way the chips are transforming photons to digital signal. There are several parameters that determine the performance, but for know, we can concentrate on the noise sources. These include shot noise (photon nature of the light, not much to do about it), thermal noise (warm camera will get electrons from a thin air), and readout noise. Now, in low light conditions, you are frequently limited by readout noise. This is a noise describing physics of electron to digital readout conversion. In essence, when you feed to the readout circuit the same amount of electrons, you will be getting different numbers due to measurement error.

When we are limited by readout, signal to noise (SNR) for larger pixels vs pixels averaged in software is dramatically different. Namely, you will get considerably better SNR when you have a larger pixel than when you average after in software (including firmware...). See https://www.photometrics.com/resourc...s/pdfs/snr.pdf for simple explanation of physics behind and compare averaging of multiple frames vs single frame long exposure for readout limited condition.

For CCDs, you should be able to change pixel size on fly (assuming that it supports it) since you readout the whole chip through the same readout circuit. So, you could change your effective pixel size and adapt for lightning conditions. For CMOS, you are limited to software averaging since each column has a separate readout.

In the end of the day, at the lower light, I would always prefer larger pixels that lead to sufficient resolution. And, as stressed by @mr_pingu, to get the photons in with the decent optics.

As for flashlight, I would suggest to go for a faster solution - LED. You already have so many things to do and are able to differentiate yourself with hardware (keyboard) and software (making steps to deliver developer-friendly device with SFOS and Android), that I would suggest to focus on that this time and not on loosing time on a complicated flash.

I can't find the exact quote now, but I remember time concerns were mentioned as one of the reasons of INOI releasing without Android support in Russian Telegram group.