About 20 yrs ago, I bought a Lumix TZ5 digital camera for about $150. It fits in a shirt pocket. A few yrs later, we spent 2 wks in China with a professional photographer. He was so famous in the photography business that one of the top two camera companies-- Nikon or Canon-- gave him $62,000 of camera equipment for free in exchange for being able to advertise that he used their cameras, which he did, but he confided that the other made better cameras. His work year was 2-3 2-4 week trips per year, then home editing the photos for the rest of the time. He estimated that in 2 weeks, he would take 9,000 photos, and, after editing, put 40 of them for sale on his corp’s web site.

One day he asked to see my shirt pocket camera. After inspecting it he said, “J---- Ch----! Nobody other than a professional photographer needs a camera with more capability than this has”.
Unless you get up into the $800 range for cell phones, you will not come close to getting a camera whose quality matches my 20 yr old Lumix. Here are the important details: 8-12 pixel resolution, & 10-12x optical zoom. There is a $50 camera that meets these requirements, but it has a lot of complaints for poor reliability.