Alas, light-field photography is not as magical as it sounds. In the end, you have a very low-resolution image equivalent to some of the earliest consumer digital cameras of ten years ago. It makes a nice toy for social media, but if you plan to print and frame, not so much. IMO, go for megapixels and quality glass, especially if you plan to crop your image at all before enlargement. For my smartphone camera, I'd rather they develop a good optical zoom.

A german firm Raytrix working on Lightfield sensor technology have overcome this hurdle now and their is no longer any loss of resolution. Might take a few years to filter through though.

In the end, you have a very low-resolution image equivalent to some of the earliest consumer digital cameras of ten years ago.

I don't agree. Most pictures from smartphones are low resolution anyway, mainly due to the lack of a proper focus and due to their very bad noise to signal ratio. Their effective resolution is always much much lower than their nominal resolution ("megapixels") and they very rarely achieve more than 1 effective megapixel, those lenses are simply too small. The ability in the new sensor to dedicate a bigger area of the sensor for each pixel (and a dedicated lense for each one), and the new ability to refocus later could be very good for smartphones and in fact it can provide bigger effective resolution in most situations.

I find that its hard to shoot with any zoom with a phone cam, because my hand always shakes a little. Image stabilization is top on my list.

@Mayday : I saw the first examples of this imaging system too, but Toshiba's is no doubt an improvement over that. Half-a-million little lenses? Also, image quality is a function of CCD image sensor size, not number of pixels, and no doubt that is also being looked into by Toshiba.