iPhone Rumors Peak On Eve of Apple’s WWDC
One day before Apple’s World-wide Developer Conference, iPhone rumors are at their peaks. By now, we would say the new iPhone specs are pretty much confirmed. If you haven’t missed our post on it, you can read it here.
New images that showed up online today confirmed the specs that we previously reported on [via Engadget]. If you look carefully at the pictures, you will see a front-facing camera, to be used for video calls. The big wild cards at this point are:
- Will Apple announce a rumored $99 iPhone?
- Will Apple announce Steve Jobs’s return to Apple?
- Will Apple announce its long-rumored tablet product?
If we were betting people (and somtimes we are), we would bet that #1 and #2 will happen but not #3 (not for tomorrow anyway).Let’s go back to talking about the new iPhone. We believe the front-facing video camera will be a big boost to Apple iChat. It’s unclear whether Apple will support other IM systems that support video (e.g. Skype, GChat, etc.), but you can bet they will support their own IM system right off the start. Either way, what that means is that you will be able to do video conferencing on your iPhone with other iPhone users and people on their PCs and Macs. Video conferencing products have been around for many years, but have never really gained mass adoption. But we think that Apple has the magic mojo to make it real this time, just like they made web browsing and 3rd-party apps on phones a reality. All of a sudden, there is a lot of incentive for people to sign up for iChat so they can play video conferencing with their iPhone friends.
That does not bode well for Microsoft. For many years, we have argued that Microsoft’s strongest Windows Live asset is Messenger, but somehow the giant has never really leveraged this great asset to do anything. The Messenger client has had very limited improvements over the years, and failed to capitalize on the rise of the social networking trend.
But Microsoft has always proven to only innovate when the competition is fierce. Maybe they will come back with Windows Live IM+++ once Apple has eaten their cake.
