Utter garbage...
..not the El Reg reporting of this, but the claims made in the first instance.
So you add this lens to a cheap camera phone and it functions identically to a $20,000 microscope. Adding a single lens does not add:
- illumination
- a precision focuser
- variable magnification
- trinocular viewing
Even the test chosen seems hand-picked to sound impressive while being nothing of the sort. Viewing prepared slides at ~100x is among the easiest jobs you can ask a microscope to do - you don't have the depth of field issues affecting the stereos at even lower magnifications and you don't need the same correction for aberations as at higher power on slides. Picking this one test is akin to that scene in Top Gear - "At 40MPH this £7,000 city car easily overtakes that £250,000 supercar travelling at 30MPH" - the test is so far removed from the advanced capabilities you are paying for as to make the comparison meaningless.
Somewhere in here there may be some small development of merit, but so many layers of bullshit have been piled on top of it - whether by the original authors or the university press department - that you ultimately end up throwing out the whole lot as nonsense.