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I would pay extra for a smartphone that let me do aperture/shutter control so that I could get the DoF I wanted. People say there's no point in compact cameras anymore and that's mostly true as far as pointing and shooting, but I can still take more interesting photos with my 5-year-old compact that gives me those controls than I can on my phone, even if my phone has more megapixels.

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The controls don't matter - you can't get shallow DoF on a camera with a lens/sensor the size of the one in your phone. This is why the new iPhones mock it in software.

Chances are, a smartphone isn't going to give you the DoF you want (except by "faking it" using post-processing). There's a direct relationship between aperture for a given focal length and the front diameter of the lens. With a tiny lens and a low f-number, you're going to have a small focal length and therefore a wide DoF.

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