iPhone OS 3.2 SDK reveals video chat functionality for future iPhone / iPad

John Brownlee ()

iPhone OS 3.2 SDK reveals video chat functionality for future iPhone / iPad

What you are looking at is a screenshot of the contents of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK, and those circled files? Look at their names. That’s just About as clear an indication as there can be that a forthcoming iPhone, the iPad or both will be able to make video calls.

That’s not all. 9to5Mac has also dug up some references in some of iPad’s telephony applications of imbedded video chat strings.

For the iPhone, it’s pretty easy to guess what this means: an iPhone 4G with a forward-facing camera as well as a back-mounted one (or, even more elegantly, a single swivel-able camer capable of pointing both forwards and back… although that would likely require a substantial change to the iPhone’s streamlined, iconic design).

But could this mean that the iPad will support video chat after all? Although there’s been no announcement of a camera in the iPad, it seems like Steve Jobs’ iPad already had one, and a slot for iSight camera is already built into the frame.

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Could Apple simply have held this announcement back to make sure that the addition of a camera module to the iPad didn’t hold back the ship date (similar to the way the last iPod Touch ditched its planned camera module at the 11th hour)? Or, more cynically, is Apple simply leaving out iPad video chat for the first generation so as not to tarnish the luster of the forthcoming iPhone update?

9 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPad, iPhone, News, Top stories |

  • http://mactips.blogbus.com 麦客沈

    cool. Hopefully the next iPhone will have a camera at front

  • http://www.brandonmartinez.com/ Brandon Martinez

    I thought this is from the 3.2 SDK?

  • arqdolim

    Indeed, it is SDK iPhone OS 3.2

  • John Brownlee

    Don’t know how I made that mistake (confusion between iPhone 4G and 4.0 is my guess). Thanks for the correction, though! It’s fixed.

  • lllSCOOPlll

    apple is evil , why cant they just put everything that should be there in the 1st release , but NO ! they want ur money in every time a new device genaration comes out .. i love the iphone but god i hate apple that i want to scratch the back apple logo out of it !

  • Gene

    “a slot for iSight camera is already built into the frame.”

    Wasn’t this debunked almost as soon as the rumor started? (i.e., no “repair parts” have been sent out to any third party repair companies for a product that hasn’t even been offered for sale yet.) Way to fact-check there.

    And @SCOOP – Apple exists to make a profit. I’m sure you also drive a car with the emblem scratched out because last year it didn’t have heated seats or a leather interior, but they added them this year? Every consumer products company does this. One would think we’d all be used to it by now, but I guess Apple is big and glistening and interesting and makes for a good target while Ford doesn’t.

  • mike

    theres a difference between apple doing it and other companies like car companies because apple leaves out the basic features We didnt even have texting til last summer we have a 3 mp camera There are samsung and lg phones in other countries with 8 and 10 mp cameras and they dont give them to you for at least the third update of the iphone Companies like ford leaving stuff like leathers seats is not that big a deal

  • Charli

    well scoop, for one, putting everything in at once makes it hard to bug fix.

    also, this does NOT mean a built in camera. it just means support for camera. that could be external.

  • Martin

    .. or maybe Apple left it out to keep the price down. They could then introduce it in the next iPad refresh without increasing the price as they would have recovered some of their development cost