I agree that the binary switch is very annoying - when zooming with my fingers I have to make sure I don't get stuck at 3.8x or something and need to cross over

I agree that the binary switch is very annoying - when zooming with my fingers I have to make sure I don't get stuck at 3.8x or something and need to cross over to 4.X to get decent quality. Ideally 3.8x would still use 4x camera to fill most of the frame and the main camera would fill just the edges. The idea is quite simple, but it's rather difficult to implement in practice. The lenses have each different character, optical flaws, color rendering and naive merging would look pretty bad. But it does sound like something AI tech could handle.