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So Apple has announced a deli­cious new iPhone. Some­thing of a feast for the eyes and the geek­dom cor­tex, which has me won­der­ing if I can jus­tify part exchan­ging my 3GS. That screen and the HD video cam­era in par­tic­u­lar have me drool­ing — it would cer­tainly be great to film mini-Aaron with as she goes off explor­ing the world. The new video con­fer­en­cing cap­ab­il­it­ies how­ever’, don’t leave me all that enthused. After all, we’re talk­ing about a tech­no­logy that took almost 80 years to reach main­stream adoption.

Per­son­ally, I’m not con­vinced that the video call­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies of the iPhone will be a huge hit. It’s not hurt­ing any­one by being there, but to some extent it feels like it’s check­ing a box on a fea­ture list. I mean real­ist­ic­ally, why would you make a video call when it’s so much easier and nat­ural to make a phone call? You don’t have to hold your phone out at an awk­ward pos­i­tion (which is at arms length if you want to avoid an unflat­ter­ing angle), you don’t have to worry about what you look like or where you are, and you don’t have to worry about whether or not the other per­son can hear you. Cer­tainly there are situ­ations in which video can be extremely use­ful, group bond­ing is a good example, ser­i­ous nego­ti­ations another, but why would you use a mobile phone to do any of those? Can you ima­gine doing that on a train — keep­ing your phone held out in-front of you for an hour long meet­ing? Maybe we’ll see a range of hel­mets released with an iPhone caddy on the end of a snooker cue that’s fixed to the top. We’ll call it iHel­met­Time and make mil­lions! That is, until iNeck­brace­Time come out with a com­pet­ing product that includes built-in Bluetooth and cup holder.

So I think video con­fer­en­cing on the iPhone is going to be a no-go. It strikes me as one of those things that people will use a couple of times when their friends and then never use again. But as for the rest of the iPhone 4? Nom. Want.

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