iPhone video chat: Your screen is your camera
Apple just received a patent for integrating a camera directly into the screen. From my post about it two years ago:
What if the screen is the camera? What if you could look right at the screen during a video chat? Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Wouldn’t people then think you were looking right at them? Wouldn’t that make video chats even more personal and emotional?— Secret iChat hardware feature in Leopard?, Watching Apple, May 13, 2007
The context back then was iChat but it makes even more sense for iPhone, where video chatting would require a camera facing you on the same side as the screen, while taking photos or videos would require a camera on the other side of the phone so you could frame them on the screen. Hiding the camera in the screen would also preserve the visual elegance of the iPhone’s hardware design.
Your iPhone would then contain two cameras—one for video chats, the other for photos and video. Cost would likely rise; size and weight would likely rise a bit; but power usage wouldn’t necessarily increase because the iPhone might prevent you from using both cameras at the same time.
Perhaps video may require a pricier plan, since it’s otherwise hard to imagine carriers getting excited about all that video traffic on their networks, especially since at least one report says iPhone users are already generating up to four times as much data volume as other smartphone users. On the other hand, it could be WiFi-only.
Easy-to-use video conferencing would probably convince many to buy their first iPhone. And it’s exactly the kind of feature that would get existing users to buy another iPhone, something Apple’s probably very interested in.