It looks like the digital camera industry is moving quickly towards building mobile operating systems into its products.

Yesterday we reported that a soon-to-arrive Nikon camera will be powered by Android, and today rumors have emerged that Sony will be offering something similar in its NEX line of mirrorless cameras.
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Apollon is a concept camera designed by product designer Gordon Tiemstra for his industrial design university project. The big concept is that the camera can be physically combined with your friends’ cameras, allowing them to snap photographs together to create things like panoramas and 3D photographs. The images captured by any camera in the cluster is wirelessly transferred to all of the others, giving everyone the complete set of images that were snapped.
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Imagine a world in which cameras are as connected to the web as cell phones and purchased with contracts from wireless service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. That world may not be too far off. Last week we reported that both Samsung and Panasonic are considering Android-powered cameras that would offer third-party apps and many of the same things offered by mobile phones.

Samsung officials were also quoted as saying that “in a year or two cameras will have the same processing power and memory as smartphones,” and that, “once the cloud computing era truly dawns, a non-connected device will be meaningless. In that case, the camera will need real-time connectivity, and [carriers] are looking for devices like this.”

Samsung looking ahead to carrier-subsidized ‘connected cameras’ [Dpreview]

Image credit: Canon IXUS 100 IS / SD780 IS by iJammin