As I speak, Steve Jong-Il Jobs has just departed the stage at WWDC in San Francisco, having just unveiled the next iteration of the iPhone to a crowd of squealing fanboys who were so busy pumping their incoherent babblings onto the Internet they actually brought the leviathan Wi-Fi network screeching to a halt, forcing Jobs to ask people to actually turn their laptops’ wi-fi off while he finished the demo.
The new phone has a number of features – apart from a new, slimmer, more squarish (and, in my opinion, more handsome) design which should be familiar to any regular Gizmodo reader, a new camera with a flash, and an absurdly-christened “retina display” with a 960×640 resolution, the new “killer feature” is something called FaceTime.
Ostensibly, this is a video calling feature: unlike 3G video calls it seems to only work over Wi-Fi for now, and, technically, the implementation doesn’t look half bad. It should also help to silence critics who’ve “pah”d at the fact that previous iPhones have lagged behind other phones, which have been able to do this for year (my Skypephone, before it died, could handle video calls – after a fashion, since there was no forward-facing camera).
I’d be willing to argue, however, that no-one will use it anyway. True, it’ll see a minor explosion in use for a little while, but then it’ll fall back to its core usage: people who communicate through sign language, and grandmothers who want to see their little cherubs’ faces when they speak to them.
My rationale is as follows. Firstly, video calling is far more inconvenient than conventional phone calls.
With my current non-smartphone, to place a call I dial the number (or select a contact) and press the phone to my ear, and talk when the other end answers. On the iPhone, this is a largely similar affair – hit “phone”, select contact or dial number, put phone to ear, wait for other end to answer.
With video calling, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, you have to activate FaceTime while the phone’s still ringing. Then, before the other person answers, you have to hold the phone up, in front of your face, so that you can see the screen reasonably well and the camera can see you. It’s generally here that you realise you look like a drunken elephant, and quietly deactivate the video call part.
Credit to Apple, this does seem to be a little better than the status quo: now, it seems, if the video (carried by WiFi) goes, the audio will stay put. However, it doesn’t tackle the critical issue that I need to hold the phone a foot or so away from my face for it to work properly: until Apple invents some kind of anti-gravity technology to make it hover alongside me as I walk down the street, I can’t see this problem going away. (Besides, I can’t imagine doing that in public: it’d make you look like a complete and utter fool.)
Second, there’s another very good reason why video chatting hasn’t caught on already: most people like the privacy. I can’t imagine, for instance, anyone wanting to answer phone in Facetime if they’ve just come out of the shower, or if it’s four in the morning and they’re desperately trying to hide the other person in the bed when the husband calls. And this is before we even begin to account for facial expressions or other potentially embarrassing gaffes.
So, I suppose it’s good Apple’s finally implemented it (and I’ll know if they’ve implemented it well when I’ve seen it.) However, I don’t imagine it’ll see much use at all.
Image courtesy of Apple
