Flurry Of New Apps Turn Aging iPhones Into Vidcams

photo: Holger Ellgaard

Back in the day, Louis Lumière and others magically set still pictures in motion, and — voila — the motion picture was born.

Over 100 years later, unbelievably, the ability to make motion pictures still hadn’t appeared on arguably the most advanced smartphone in the world — even more absurd was the fact that phones much cheaper and less sophisticated had absolutely no problem shooting video. Yes, the 3GS has a pretty cool vidcam feature, but the Original and 3G still couldn’t shoot video.

Only now, they can.

A few weeks ago, mysteriously, vidcam apps started popping up at the App Store. First was iVideoCamera, reviewed by CoM’s Giles Turnbull; then two others:

Camcorder, which beats iVideoCamera’s comparatively underpowered 160×213 resolution with a resolution of 320×426. Like iVideoCamera, it’s $1.

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Then iVidCam appeared, which records at a 280×360 resolution, and beats iVideoCamera’s 3 frames per second with a claimed 3-7 fps, and no recording time limit — and most impressively, all for free. Or drop a buck for the paid version, which adds 10x digital zoom and higher 320×427 resolution.

(Of course, jailbroken iPhones could shoot video ages ago, but then they can also turn into hovercraft and be used as goat-milking devices, so we’ve ignored them for the purposes of this post).

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