Over the last few months, there have been an increasing number of reports pointing to video calling functionality in a new iPhone, expected to be released this summer.
The majority of evidence has been found inside of the iPhone OS 4 SDK and iPhone 4 firmware. More recently, the leak of the prototype iPhone from Gizmodo clearly revealed a front-facing camera which essentially puts all doubts to rest.
With the latest iPhone 4 beta 2 SDK, further evidence continues to point to video calling capabilities. A new set of status/error text strings have been found revealing various video conferencing commands. One of the more interesting strings is that iPhone may need to be “registered” in order to receive video calling capabilities:
ACCOUNT_NOT_REGISTERED_MESSAGE = “This device has not been registered for video conferencing.”;
A video calling feature is expected to be used over both WiFi and 3G networks. As the majority of Canadian carriers already support video calling (it’s not very good though), it will be interesting to see whether we must pay for “video calling minutes” or if the calls will simply come out of our monthly data plans.
