No Video on the iPhone 3G - Really!

My biggest disappointment on the feature set for the iPhone 3G was the complete and utter absence of any reference to capturing video (OK - as well as not upgrading the camera)

Since then it's been suggested both on the MacJury and the MacRoundtable podcasts, that the provision of video is a feature that may well be addressed by 3rd Part Apps. It has been suggested that video hooks are exposed in the API that would allow developers to create video apps.

The original 1st Gen iPhone was capable from a hardware level and some apps were made available to jailbroken iPhones that allowed you to capture and send video. I suppose I really need to get out of the mind set that if Apple don't provide the feature on the iPhone, it's not going to happen, now that we have authorised applications being developed for the iPhone.

I can now forgive Apple the absence of a syncronised to do list as it looks like the OmniGroup will meet this requirement and more to the nth degree with the launch of OmniFocus for the iPhone. Location aware task lists anyone? Mind boggling!

So we'll just have to see if we get some decent video apps from the developer community.

As an aside, I've also read somewhere (sorry for the lack of attribution) that a potential reason why Apple didn't introduce a video chat client in the latest iPhone 3G is that they considered the impact this would have on the current 3G infrastructure.

I can fully understand this. Video chat on the current range of normal 3G phones has been available for a while and hasn't caused a problem. As we've seen with internet browsing on the iPhone, once you do something right, people will use the feature. My assumption is that people haven't been using video chat on the current 3G phones as it either not been implemented very well, or that the critical mass of users has not been great enough.

Introduce an Apple designed Video iChat client on the new iPHone 3G and release it to a rapidly expanding population of iPhone users and take up would be instant and dramatic.

Could the current 3G network infrastructure cope with this dramatic explosion of high bandwidth traffic overnight?

Probably not, and perhaps not for a while.

So if Apple were to introduce video chat, the network would collapse, the user experience would be very poor and the iPhone would be tarnished although the fault lies with the telecom infrastructure.

Seems a perfect reason to me whilst Apple would hold back on introducing video hat to all iPhone users.