Hasta La Gadget!

Barely a day after Apple introduced iPhone OS 4 and made a beta available to developers, details have begun to trickle out about the new multi-tasking operating system. One enterprising reader of The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) ran system monitoring tool iStat on an iPhone running v4 and came up with the screenshot above.

Most of it looks fairly unassuming, but iChat is new, and the folks at TUAW make a huge leap form here, assuming that iChat equals front-facing camera “It seems unlikely that Apple would merely introduce an instant messaging app without support for video conferencing,” they write.

I remain unconvinced. First, why run a chat daemon at all if there is no camera present. Second, iChat is not just a video-conferencing app. And third, who wants it anyway? The iPad could do with a webcam for making Skype calls (although an actual rear-facing camera on the iPad seems plain stupid on such a big device), but the iPhone? Who really wants to video-conference on a tiny screen? It would be a novelty at best.

I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that a front-facing camera is the FM-radio of its day. Every iPod competitor put one in, and everyone thought Apple would eventually include one in the iPod. It took almost ten years to arrive (and you can bet that nobody uses the radio in the Nano). IChat? Sure. iSight? Nah.

iChatAgent process shows up in iPhone OS 4.0 — video conferencing coming? [TUAW]

See Also:

• Apple Unveils Next-Gen, Multitasking iPhone OS
• Skype on iPhone OS 4: Incoming Calls, But Mysteriously 3G Lags …