Apple Missed This
Mar. 21st, 2009 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mik3capFlip video cameras.
These little guys are the "new iPod". They're small, they're cheap, they do their job - the form factor isn't as sexy as an iPod/iPhone, but people want them. They want them, they want to get nice resolution video in a small package, and this market need has been filled by a small company. Except now they're a big company, because Cisco bought them up big time.
Cisco gets video, they want to corner the market on portable video devices and push those bits over networks. So now we're wondering: where the hell is Apple? Apple's got this great iChat video conferencing thing going. They've got iPhones with still cameras, and those cameras can clearly be used as video cameras as proven by jailbreakers. Yet iPhoneOS 3.0 has no provision for this! Very, very strange.
Well, I suspect that they are working on a video camera of their own. Ars Technica reported recently on some new product IDs found in the iPhoneOS - the mysterious "iProd" may very well be an iCam of the Flip variety. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a touch device with a sweet camera built into it, with a zoom feature, and integration with iMovie and all that? Maybe you could even get a little case that puts them together like a clamshell, and have the two devices communicate together over Bonjour or Bluetooth, and THEN you could do video chat with the iCam pointed at your face, and your friend appearing in the iPhone while you talk to it?? Or have one device be a full screen keyboard, and the other just be a full display?
That's what I want to see. Apple, are you listening?
These little guys are the "new iPod". They're small, they're cheap, they do their job - the form factor isn't as sexy as an iPod/iPhone, but people want them. They want them, they want to get nice resolution video in a small package, and this market need has been filled by a small company. Except now they're a big company, because Cisco bought them up big time.
Cisco gets video, they want to corner the market on portable video devices and push those bits over networks. So now we're wondering: where the hell is Apple? Apple's got this great iChat video conferencing thing going. They've got iPhones with still cameras, and those cameras can clearly be used as video cameras as proven by jailbreakers. Yet iPhoneOS 3.0 has no provision for this! Very, very strange.
Well, I suspect that they are working on a video camera of their own. Ars Technica reported recently on some new product IDs found in the iPhoneOS - the mysterious "iProd" may very well be an iCam of the Flip variety. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a touch device with a sweet camera built into it, with a zoom feature, and integration with iMovie and all that? Maybe you could even get a little case that puts them together like a clamshell, and have the two devices communicate together over Bonjour or Bluetooth, and THEN you could do video chat with the iCam pointed at your face, and your friend appearing in the iPhone while you talk to it?? Or have one device be a full screen keyboard, and the other just be a full display?
That's what I want to see. Apple, are you listening?