Wired complains that the iPhone doesn’t have video chat, others want regular iChat and MMS and a video camera. I want all of those _and_ a pony.
It’s pretty clear why there’s no text-based iChat on the iPhone: AT&T. Why would they give up charging for SMS messaging if you could just iChat to your heart’s content? Same thing applies to an iPhone VoIP solution. If you can end-around AT&T, their points of leverage continue to erode. I suspect that Apple will release both text-based iChat and a VoIP option in the future, but the question is will AT&T have a role?
As for have a video camera instead of a still camera, the issues there are obvious. One, capturing digital video takes a lot processing and thus power consumption goes up. Usable phone life then goes down. Apple doesn’t want users to get an impression that the iPhone’s battery life is weak, so you have to carefully constrain features like these. Secondly, digital video, of any reasonable quality, takes up a lot space. On a 4GB iPhone, you’d be filling up space pretty quickly if you start to shoot video.
A WiFi-enabled video iChat iPhone would be killer, but that’s a lot to expect right out of the gate. You have to believe Apple has this running in their labs.
