How many megapixels do you need?
I want 5,000 x 5,000 images because eventually I intend to view and edit the photos on a real computer like my laptop or desktop.
Why would anyone qualify the necessity of a hiven resolution, based on the practicality of its usefulness on the phone that takes the picture?
Having larger resolutions provides leniency for poor camera work, so that you can crop, but still have good resolution in the cropped image.
The title of this submission is misleading, as it's only talking about mobile cameras.
With mobile cameras, it's not just the issue of how many pixels our sensor's got, but also the size of those on the wafer itself. The bigger, the better (better illumination etc.).
Given the bad lens characteristics of mobile phones, sure, the bigger the better. (As downer98 said: easier to crop and still have a good picture). But when talking about proper cameras (DSLRs or similar), having more megapixels is not just about being able to crop and still have a great image...
EDIT: it'd also have been great to have a DSLR version of sample picture. Just by contrasting the various mobile photos, we don't know what the original image "really" looks like.