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Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone
An anonymous reader writes "The recently awarded iPhone patent contains hidden claims which indicate Apple is planning to bring video calling and recording features to the iPhone, according to InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe. Buried within the 'embodiments' section of patent number 7,479,949 is this: 'In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital videoing, web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing.' Wolfe also cites language indicating Apple is aware that having a rear-facing camera is an impediment towards video calls (and also taking pictures of yourself.): 'In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user's image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display.' Screen caps of the patent drawing are also available."
Why is this news?
A 3G phone which can do video calls!? Omg!! ...
A phone which can use its camera for storing videos and which can play music? No shit!
I had assumed the iPhone could already do video-calls, kinda shitty the 3G one can't (if that's really so.)
Someone can watch a video of my inner ear while listening to me
Nullius in verba
This is great! Now, can we please have MMS and copy/paste like smartphones from 8 years ago?
or was it their intention all along to release such a great new feature that you couldn't upgrade to without upgrading the whole phone, thereby having to buy a new one?
no apple would NEVER do something like that.. ;-)
frog blast the vent core
The iPhone's screen points one way.
The iPhone's camera points in the opposite direction.
Kinda hard to have a video conference when you have to be on both sides of the device at once for it to work.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
"Good enough" is not really in Apple's vocabulary, though. I've seen many MP3 phones before the iPhone, and all of them were "good enough". You could drag files onto the memory cards, the music playing app would pick them up. You could play, pause, next, shuffle... all the basic features.
But I hated all of them. They were "good enough", but not "good". When I got my hands on the iPhone I felt that it was finally media integration into a phone, done right.
I don't think Apple is going to release video-calling until they have a compelling way to work around the limitations of existing implementations.
See the new Nintendo DSi for a good example:
- hi-res camera in the rear for taking pictures
- low-res camera in the front for video conferencing (given the resolution of the Nintendo DSi, even a 0.3 megapixel camera is completely overkill)
By the way.. is any of what has been mentioned actually innovative? It all seems terribly familiar to me...
When has that ever stopped the USPTO from handing out a patent? /sarcasm
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Back in the 90's, I did some work for the Ontario Telepresence Project. We did lots of studies on videoconferencing, shared mediaspaces...
What strikes me given the relative lack of outcome of the project, compared to the ubiquity of today's camera phones, is that the Telepresence project had it wrong when it wanted to have people *face* each other during conversations.
It turns out, this is not what we want. Staring at your interlocutor's face is not what you do in a usual conversation, it's even embarassing. You look at a shared point of interest. Turning the camera the opposite side of the screen was the way to go. First, you could use the cell phone as a camera, and second, in a phone conversation, it's much more useful to say "look at this", than to offer a nice view of you're hairy nose.
Or, to put it like St. Exupery:
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction...
iChat don't do MSN. Webcam don't work with ICQ or something such, file transfer may not be supported over Jabber, multiple contact lists for each protocol is retarded
.. Also it's not very good at figuring out what is spam or not.
iChat works with AIM, which is fine. I doubt Apple was in a hurry to hop on Microsoft's network, Yahoo video chat sucks greasy dick, and who the hell even uses ICQ anymore? If the webcam doesn't work with ICQ, then blame ICQ for not supporting it. Apple doesn't write their software. I've seen third party apps that have no problem accessing iSights, so quit complaining. Jabber support seems kind of tacked on in iChat. I think Apple knew that grandma wasn't ever going to touch it, so they didn't pretty it up much.
iTunes have very limited format support and as far as I know you can't let it synchronize the content of a directory without letting it manage a complete library.
iTunes will rip your CDs, buy songs from their online store, and plays MP3s just fine. WMAs can be set to be converted. As far as music goes, their format support is dandy. Videos are a different matter, but I believe you can put any format supported by Quicktime in it. Get Perian and away you go. Putting them on iPods is another ball of wax.
iPhoto don't do adjustments as good as aperture or lightroom and they don't work good with each other / list the adjusted photos of the later ones in iPhoto. It's good enough for browsing saved photos but that's about it.
No shit, Sherlock! Since when was iPhoto supposed to be a full-blown photo editor? Why don't you just bitch that you can't do fine audio editing in iTunes? iPhoto is like iTunes for pictures. Organize, print, and some light retouching. That satisfies most people. If you want to do high-quality adjustments, then use Lightroom or Aperture. iPhoto doesn't really talk to them because it's not supposed to. Aperture isn't meant for retouching your 3MP jpegs and Lightroom would need to read the iPhoto library, something I don't think Adobe gives a damn about.
iLife and iWork would probably do better with a manual.
Did you even LOOK for a manual? Ever heard of that help menu, online content, and PDFs?
Mail don't want to check mails for spam before I open the mails (over IMAP) which is kinda useless because if I have opened the mail then I'll already know if it's spam or not
Maybe that's because IMAP stores your email server-side instead of downloading them to your computer like POP3 does. You have to teach the spam filter. It's not perfect, but it gets better over time.
Seriously, this is a lot of baseless bitching. Apple isn't going to do exactly what YOU want them to do with the software. They're going to try and satisfy as many people as they can, and that means appealing to the home market.