We've been promised video calls for years, but they've never really taken off - but thanks to last night's Apple announcements, we might need to smarten ourselves up whenever the phone rings.
Apple changed music with the iPod - and it looks like it's going to use the same bit of kit to change the way we talk, too.
Adding the FaceTime video calling system to the iPod touch means that FaceTime may be heading for prime time.
Until yesterday FaceTime was brilliant and largely pointless: it was only available for the iPhone 4, so if all your friends weren't early-adopting free-spending latte-sipping hipsters who hold their phones really, really carefully then FaceTime suffered from the Only Fax Machine In The World problem: who do you call when no-one has the kit?
FaceTime on the iPod touch changes that. Steve Jobs reckons Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices a day, and a good proportion of those devices are iPod touches - which means that over the Christmas period hundreds of thousands of people will end up with FaceTime-enabled iPods in their stockings.
The odds are that while you might not know many iPhone 4 owners, you'll know plenty of iPod touch owners - and increasingly, you'll be able to talk to them via FaceTime.
FaceTime everywhere
The next step for Apple is obvious: FaceTime in everything else.
There's no technical reason it can't be in OS X - FaceTime's really just iChat AV in different trousers - and the widely expected cameras in next year's second generation iPad mean it should come to Apple's tablet, too, ushering in a whole new world of chinny videos shot from unflattering angles.
While Apple is at it it could easily add it to the Apple TV: an add-on camera wouldn't be that expensive, even with Apple's massive profit margins, and FaceTime on your HDTV would deliver some of the wow factor Apple's telly box desperately needs.
Don't forget that FaceTime is supposed to be an open standard, too. In the long term, that means it should appear on all kinds of devices, not just ones with the Apple logo.
The big question is whether people want to see one another on the phone. I think the older generation hate the idea. I certainly do, but that's because I have what's best described as a face for radio and some really ugly friends.
Phone networks won't like it, either, because if it takes off it'll mean massive data demands over networks that often struggle to cope with Twitter.
But I reckon The Kids - that is, the constantly videoing, texting, chatting, oversharing Kids who can't take a breath without videoing it and uploading it to YouTube - will love it.
Apple isn't the first firm to try to take video calling into the mainstream - but it wasn't the first firm to make an MP3 player, either. That worked out OK, didn't it?
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Your comments (6) Click to add a new comment
garymarshall
September 5th 2010
6. Optimaximal: back porting isn't an issue. iPhone 4s are selling fast, iPod touches will do the usual big numbers over Xmas, get facetime onto desktop and laptop macs and you've got significant numbers.
Bradavon, bnr1066: 3G is the biggie. I doubt the lack of 3G support was apple's idea :)
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garymarshall
September 5th 2010
5. Federico, roughly 40% of all iOS devices sold to date have been iPod touches.
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federico
September 2nd 2010
4. Get your facts straight. The 230K ios devices activated were iPhones and iPad 3Gs. Send mail to IR of apple and they will verify this.
Again, part of them pattern of obfuscation by WS. Especially the good proportion false statement when in the first place activations are for 3G devices.
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bradavon
September 2nd 2010
3. This would work if they all got together and agreed on a protocol that worked across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and MeeGo but obviously they won't. It also must work over 3G too. Wireless just isn't out there enough.
Video calling has never taken off because there's always been a bandwidth issue and therefore few manufacturers have bothered to go to the expense of adding a second camera. We're not there yet (it only works over Wifi on the iPhone 4) but maybe one day.
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optimaximal
September 2nd 2010
2. How does this change anything?
This technology isn't being back ported into existing iPod Touch models and, like the iPhone 4, only Apple evangelists and the rich will dump a perfectly good 3rd-gen model for this new model that costs more and really doesn't offer much more than that retina screen and some token cameras.
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bnr1066
September 2nd 2010
1. nope.. Video calling is a non-starter no matter the generation.
all bar the travelling salesman wanting to say goodnight to the kids and party based novelty moments, video calling is a 'content-push' too far... Just cos we can doesnt mean we want to!
The kids on the street corner will only use it IF it works over the mobile networks...The mobile operators are sweating about Flash being one software iteration away from being on most phones meaning all those web Ads swallowing bandwidth (as well as the 'other' use a travelling salesman has for Flash based web content) so any application that demands great swathes of datastreams is going to fail as it it will be, for want of a better word, ****. it'll get used once and a bad experience will consign it to the bin for another 3 years.Its like the mobile equivalent of 3D TV.
Now that Apple have branded it with a 'cool' name and put tv adverts out focussed solely on it wont change the reality of using it.
Comparisons to MP3 players isnt fair... digital music is a natural evolution in managing a revenue stream, nothing to do with the feature of compressed music itself.
so all in all, its a dead duck. IMHO o'course!
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