• Video Chat
Complainers live to complain, and it seems never more so than during and following an Apple keynote. Today is no exception. Still, one complaint stood out to me above the rest.
No camera.
This seemed like a strange omission at first glance, but really, what good would the camera be? The point of having a camera on the iPhone was to enable the user to take pictures quickly on-the-go. The iPad isn’t the same kind of device. I’ve heard the rumors about video conferencing, with some even claiming that the tablet would have two cameras, one in the front and one in the back. Assuming that wouldn’t be confusing, expensive, or harmful to industrial design, video conferencing on the iPad would still suck.
When we imagine iChat or other traditional web conferencing solutions, we imagine seeing a video window with the smiling face of a loved one. Now put the camera on a tablet.
I love my friends, but I don’t want to stare up their noses.
The alternative is uncomfortably holding the damned thing in front of you. Nothing about this experience sounds pleasant to me.
I’m reminded of copy/paste on the iPhone. It was considered to be a near-unforgivable sin that it wasn’t included in the first release. Yet the iPhone sold well into the millions without it. When 3.0 was announced, there was a collective cry of “finally” from the technical community, but neglected was the fact that it was — and still is — the single best implementation of copy and paste on a mobile device. Do you think this happened at the last minute? That Apple’s designers and engineers were sitting on their asses playing Trism for two years, then haphazardly stumbled upon a best-of-breed solution completely by accident?
I suspect that Apple had the exact same idea for video conferencing. After all, they did file for a patent on technology that would allow them to place a camera behind the screen of a device. But if a nice-to-have feature doesn’t work perfectly, you throw it away and ship without it.