Okay Geek Farm
Video chat for iPhone 4 will be WiFi Only
Brandon Davenport
Well, this sucks. It has been 99% confirmed that voice calls will be WiFi only - and that sort of limits the usefulness of this by half. I was hoping to be able to be on the bus, and whip up a quick conference call with some of my editors, maybe using skype, but everything has turned out worse than expected.
The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the source code for the iPhone 4 SDK Beta 2, which blatantly states that if the chat could not find WiFi, than it knows to terminate the chat, and notify you with a message stating that the WiFi could not be found, and therefore you cant make a video call. This smells like the poopy service of AT&T at work, not being able to handle the requests over 3G, but again, the proof is here:
IMAVCHAT_COULD_NOT_CONNECT_NO_REMOTE_WIFI = “The video call could not connect because a remote Wi-Fi connection could not be established.”;
IMAVCHAT_DISCONNECTED_NO_LOCAL_WIFI = “The video call disconnected because the local Wi-Fi connection was lost.”;
Also, the new video calling feature will be integrated into Apples new “Game Center” shown off in iPhone OS 4, and will allow participants to collaberate with eachother, using video, within the Game Center. There is some source code that obviusly ties the two together.
IMAVCHAT_ERROR_NO_SUCH_PLAYER_ID = “No Such Player ID”;
IMAVCHAT_ERROR_NO_SUCH_ACHIEVEMENT = “No Such Achievement”;
IMAVCHAT_ERROR_UNRECOGNIZED_GAME_DESCRIPTION_HEADERS = “Unrecognised Game Descriptor Headers”;
IMAVCHAT_ERROR_NO_SUCH_GAME = “No Such Game”;
So obviusly, video conferencing is a 100% go for the iPhone 4, but is it a 100% go for the public? I mean who wants to make video calls from their house on their phone? I have a nice webcam and a desktop PC which I can write up some posts and play some Battlefield, all while video chatting. This just does not seem nessicary.
