How, scientifically does a iPhone camera work?

I all ready know how a regular camera works, the lens opens and the light hits a film that captures the image, but a iPhone/memory doesn't have film (right?) I'm certainly not taking my iPhone apart!

Yes, it uuses a tiny digital sensor array, smaller than your little pinkie nail, beneath the lens where the 'film' would be with millions of individual little photo-receptors that mimic the Silver Halide crystals that made the image on a roll of film.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/...ensors.htm

Wrong. Regular cameras now use a sensor, just like the phone has, more or less. The sensor in the phone is much smaller.

Underneath the lens in digital cameras - including those in phones such as the iPhone - is a sensor array. In the days of film light hitting the film that was used, caused a chemical change in a very small area of the film. With a sensor array light hitting the individual photo sites of the array sensor cause one of the following: capture of an electrical charge (photo capacitance); a change in resistance (photo resistance), or a change to the flow of electrons (photo transistor). Each of these has their advantages and disadvantages, but at the end of the day light hitting a photo site changes the electrical characteristics of that photo site, until it is reset.

I say photo-site rather than pixel because in most cameras each pixel is made up of four (occasionally three) photo-sites capturing the same colors as the electro-biological photo-sites that we have in our eyes.

Welcome to the digital age
Kodak and Polaroid are on their way to extinction

Aah you are familiar with an iPhone and memory, great
Film has made way for a sensor. That light from the lens now hits the sensor. The sensor makes the image and saves it to the memory card

The same is true for your iPhone camera too
Only that the sensor is very very tiny, as also the lens