Oh it is kind of cool.
But a complete and utter waste of programming.
Could be handy for showing someone what’s up with hardware by flipping to the back camera.
Could be fun for phone #%* in a desperate moment…maybe.
But it just isn’t natural to use.
Positives? Video is amazing! Pause and resume when you do something else is very seamless.
Negatives? Everything else.
But I am a fanboi so I’ll probably use it all the time with my few friends who are willing to put up with me and dumped monies on an iPhone 4 as well.
Note: iPad would have been MUCH better for this technology deployment release followed by the iPhone release.
Yeah, great, Apple invented a modern version of the Farnsworth (Warehouse 13 gets points for silly antique technology). Now the case I really want for my phone is a little tin box with a cover.
I guess I should be thankful that mike hasn’t figured out my phone number. :-)
I don’t really quite get why mike failed to recognize another positive: things like FaceTime are another part of the eventual decline of minute-based cellphone calling plans. The Internet is essentially always-on and virtually unlimited use, at least for the amounts of data that even a video call can reasonably take, and one exciting bit about FaceTime is that it’s able to seamlessly transition a call off of the cellular network and onto WiFi, at which point the cellular carrier is no longer billing minutes.
Smartphone customers already pay for data, some of us pay for unlimited data, even. Yet at&t happily charges 20c per text message, for those of us who do not see value in also paying for an “unlimited” texting package. Where’s the value there? Except perhaps to at&t… who gets cash from the sender AND from the recipient for the privilege of sending twitter-length messages. I can be on BeejiveIM all day and all night, communicating with people on other smartphones/featurephones, or on computers, etc., on any of half a dozen IM networks.
Sadly, Apple has been very hesitant to jeopardize its relationship with at&t, and has dragged its heels on most things that could eat away at at&t’s usage-based revenue. Examples would include things like the ongoing Google Voice fiasco, or the refusal to provide multitasking up until just recently, which made messaging through utilities such as BeejiveIM less than practical.
Now Apple needs to create a FaceTime client for the desktop.