"Super lens" for phone photographers?

The not-so pocket friendly "super lens"

Any kind of photographic quality claims attributed to phone cameras and other combo devices should be taken with a pound of salt, but the trend probably won't be going away anytime soon. But little did we know that people would go to great lengths, literally, to give their phone cams more lens power.

The latest example is a kit from Japan-based Green-House, which includes a super lens that it claims has an 8x zoom along with a handset clamp and tripod, according to Gadgetell. Yet if this kind of unwieldy appendage really becomes popular, we wonder if it just makes more sense to design a camera that adds a phone and other functions, rather than the other way around.

We're trying to imagine how our 5-megapixel camera phone showdown would have turned out had we attached this monster zoom lens.