What van Leeuwenhoek would have done with a smartphone

Van Leeuwenhoek did a lot with very little and if you look at the microscope that he used, you can have nothing but admiration for the patience that he must have had when observing and drawing what he saw. Microscopes are fairly commonplace these days, even in schools although they are expensive. They work by using a spherical lens to magnify objects up close with a second lens to magnify the image obtained.

Surpisingly (or not) smartphones can be combined with small short focus spherical lenses to create a very simple yet remarkably effective microscope. The spherical lenses used in laser pointers are ideal for this and with a few bits of perspex, wood, a drill and some bolts and the desire to play around a bit, it is possible to construct the phone-microscope.
(see http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/)

I was really quite surprised by the quality of this very rudimentary array.

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The classical view of onion skin cells

They look like neurons but they aren't, they are really silverberry pollen grains.

Smartphone on perspex stage holding the lens. Focussing is by adjusting the height of the stage holding the slide