iPad / iPhone Video Chat Predictions

My prediction is the iPhone will get a video-chat camera in the next update. It's a very logical update that again steps ahead of most competitors. But the iPad won't for at least another generation or two.

My thinking why? Bandwidth vs Screen Size. The bigger the video, the more speed is needed.

On an iPhone, a video feed of 320x320 would fill the screen horizontally, still leaving space below for buttons. And an even smaller video window could be done if a thumbnail of your own video was displayed too in some sort of overlapping rectangles. With some eye-candy around the squares (and having them not overlap), it could likely get to a pretty small video dimension that needed to be sent over the Internet and it would still look good on the iPhone's screen.

AT&T and other cell phone providers might be able to handle that :)

A similar sized video rectangle would look not only look tiny on an iPad screen, it would look silly at that size. WiFi could handle the speeds needed to do a video size that would look reasonable (640x480 or something like that.) AT&T and other cell phone providers I think would struggle to do that.

So that's my predictions!