Google patented a smartphone with 8 flashes

The other day - January 29, 2013, google received a patent , an application for which was filed back in September last year, which describes a smartphone equipped with eight (I’m sorry if you have the correct “eight”) with flashes located around the photo module lens. The flashes can fire synchronously, as well as separately from each other, depending on the degree of illumination.
So probably the next nexus will have this somewhat unusual flash.

LED flash is known to be worse than xenon, but perhaps several LEDs will finally be able to provide enough illumination in order to achieve xenon quality. With less power consumption and less thickness.

So what to do with multiple flashes?

The first thing that comes to mind is to use them together at the same time, providing a good glow, and a smaller shadow.

You can also use a selective number of flashes, based on the current illumination, in order not to overdo it, because a lot of light is also bad.
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And in HDR it will be used by taking several pictures in a row with a different number of LEDs involved, and then combining them all into one good quality photo.

Well, if you show imagination, you can come up with something to process the shadow from each flash and then analyzing each image to get an approximate volume of the object, for example.