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More often than not, Digital. Consider: How in the world would the motor for moving a lens fit in a phone case? For that matter, where would the find the room to have variable focal length? Would the manufacturers really put such a battery-drainer in the unit? How much more expensive would it be, too? Should somebody actually come up with a phone with ...

Al Everett has suggested that "no Android camera has [optical zoom]", but the 14-Megapixel Altek Leo Android seems to have 3x optical zoom "(not digital like other cellphones)." The Altek Leo won't be available until at least 2011, though.

Um there is a way to tell if the phone has a optical lense... Actually 2 ways. When zooming in, is there a motor sound coming from the phone? When zooming in, does the camera lens look different (duh, it zoomed so it should look different when looking directly into the camera). 99% chance that the answer is NO.

This may be a long shot but check the camera lens, it might have a small piece of see through plastic that starts to get worn out. Pictures on my new phone were blurry right from the start and I didn't know what to do. Then I noticed that the lens felt a bit rubbery, so I scratched very carefully with my nails and to my amazement the small piece of rubber ...

(I'll address your 2nd edit below...) Some cheap camera modules don't include an auto focus feature, i.e. they are fix-focus'ed to infinity. Barcode scanners need a near focus though and cannot (or hardly) scan the resulting blurry images that result from infinity-focused fix-focus cameras. The only way around this would be to attach a macro lens ...