The features of modern consumer electrickery increase year on year, but the limits of physics remain.
At the core of any electric camera is an electric photo-sensor. On a camera-phone or compact this is generally pretty small. Forget the number of mega-pixies it may boast; but the sensor will be a sliver of silly-cone, that ion a smart phone may only be a couplr of mm square. In a typical APS-C sensor DSLR, it will be about 12mm x 16, and in a 'full-frame' DSLR it will bne the same size as a bit of 35mm film, 24x36mm; Ied umpety times bigger.
Lets talk the crop-factor..... much over-used and oft mis-understood term... a lens is a lens is a lens; eg, if I pick up the old M42 screw fit film camera a few feet away from me, that has a 50mm lens on the front. This is the 'normal angle' lens. Ie its neither wide angle nor telephoto. It also has a fixed focal length of 50mm so its not a 'soom' either. BUT that 'normal' angle is deturmined from having an ngle of view of 'about' 45degrees.
Wider is a wide angle; narrower is a telephoto. Wide angles make subjects small in the frame, telkephotos make the same subject big... ZOOM is merely a variable focal lengthy.. it may be wide angle, teklephoto or both, and the usual 'kit' zooms that come one most conmsumer cameras are both, eg the 18-55mm, kit lens on my Electroic Pictuire maker is a wide angle at 18mml, a mild telephoto at 55mm a 'normal angle' at 35mm but all the whgile a ZOOM 'sos I can change that angle of biew or focal length twisting the 'zoom' ring.
Lets stick the 50mm 'normal angle' 50mm lens from the film camera on the electric picture maker... its still a 50mm lens, BUT with a smaller sensor behind it, its only capturing the central position of the image it would put on 35mm film, the image is 'cropped' and has an angle of view of just 30 degrees... important thing here is that the focal length has not changed, just how much of the image the lens projecvts on the sensor we chuck away.... or 'crop' and the smaller the sensor the more we crop, the narrower the angle of view we effectively get, the more 'telephoto' the view becomes.
This is very useful if you are a camera maker; now the smaller the sensor you use, first the cheaper that tends to be to make, but also the shorter and hence cheaper the lens that gives the 'normal' 45Deg ish angle of view, more still, the greater the 'crop factor' the more effective zoom you can get out of a lens, fort any particular mm of 'zoom' travel....
eg; the 'normal' angle zoom on my EPM is 18-55mm, a focal length travel of 37mm, for 3x zoom. the normal angle zoom for one of my 35mm film cameras is 35-70mm, a travel of 35mm for just 2x zoom. So with a smaller sensor you get more effective zoiom x for the same or less actual lens teavel. A litrtke more extreme, on the small sensor 'Bridge' camera, a sticker boasts 30x zoom, but it gets that from the smasll sensor sixe asnd hige crop-factor NOT an enormous amount of lenxs travel.
There is a certain amount of 'so what' to this and it largely doesn't matter, but it does.
I have a little micro-sensor action cam, which has just a 4.5mm lens as its 'normal angle' ie about 45deg AoV. I also have a 180 deg AoV fish-eye for the APS-C SLR which is also 4.5mm focal length... at such short focal length the closest focus distance and the range of critical focus beyond that is also peculiarly short, to the point that with the EPM, the 4.5mm lens is effectively focus free and everything I will likely ever point the camera at will be in acceptable focus.... a phienomina exploited by the action cam maker who can effectivelyu fix the focus of the action cam lens so it doesn't hav to have ANY focus mechnism, let alone a complicated and expensive 'auto-focus' system, anmd the lens and camera arte cheaper to make....
This is fine if you want nice sharp in focus pictures, it is NOT so wonderful if you want to see pictures with the back-ground out of focus and those 'bokah' effects so many rave abouit from using wide apertures, because small sensor cameras just wont make them.....
Its actually something that lead to the F-No arms race on 35mm film cameras in the 1970's and 80's, and the fast fifties of old, that negged folk fitting them to more modern EPM's begging fast aperture f1.8 or f1.4 lenses to let folk try get these sort of effects... when 120 roll film cameras were the norm, folk got these shallow focus effects by accident os the crop factor wors backwards too; I have a 120 folder also in arms reach, the lens on that that gives the aprox 45 Deg normal' AoV is actually 105mm, for a 60x90mm size 'sensor'.. that lens gives a faior bit of 'Bokah' at normal-ish sort of focusing ranged even at what would be considered pretty moderate f-numbers, like maybe f4, because the lens is so 'long'.. hence when 35mm 'small format' cameras came along manufacturers chased ever lower f-number to get the same effect.. and trend has continued with ever 'faster' f-no lenses for small sensor digital cameras....
I mention all this because it is illustrative of the difference.... oif you get even a compact digital camera, it will likely still have a pretty small sensor size, making such effects harder to achieve. The difference between 35mm filom and 120 roll film film is fairly large, but even 35mm film is making it hard work. Get down to APS-C sixed senors and its vcey hard, and smaller still, nie on impossible.
You also get other effects and anoloies where the smaller sensor cameras are not making it easy to explore photographic technique or effect.
And of thats your goal, then 'really' you should take any fixed lns camera off the menu, and be looking at more conventional interchangeable lens cameras, whether MFT or APS-C sensor cameras, because whatever the marketing hype of smaller sensor offerings ultimately they re likely to frustrate, giving you 'bit' of the big camera versatility but ultimately not the full-monty.... ie entice without encouraging you.....
Depends what your expectations and aspirations are though ultimately.... {ersonally I dont get on with cwmera phones; they are like a swiss army penknife, handy, but jack of all trades masters of none, and dam,n fiddly to use! I hated it when my daughter handed me her smart phone and asked me to take a photo; with banana fingers to start I dont get on with touch screens, but having to go through half a dozen menus just to get to the camera function, rather than just the one 'om-off' witch on a compact or more conventional WPM and not even that on many film cameras! Is/Was a cjhore I could do without, especially if I was trying to grab a short lived 'moment'. Here a proper camera scored big time. Beyond that IF I was tackling anything tricky or awkward or trying anything more technical, the versatility of a more elaborate SLR was almost essential...
So.. do you just want to take snap-shots, in which case a camera phone is as good as anything, and of to hand and you can use it convenient; if you want to dop this photography thing though, you probably need an interchangeable lens SLR at lest to start the learning, as entry level DSLR's offer a lot of versatility and bang for your buck, where even MFT or mirrorless system cameras are probably a bit higher up the food chain and beg you know more before you start....
So it depends what you want really, BUT I wouldn't pick a smart phone for camera 'features' any more than I would pick a camera to make phone calls!!! Horses for courses, and there is so little twixt consumer phone-cams and consumer compact & bridge cams, that its the wrong question, really...