To those complaining about the lack of a front-facing camera/iChat video feature:
I was disappointed as well, but then realized that this is probably not something that Apple can provide at the current time anyway. This is because effectively adding iChat capability would be like allowing VoIP calls over the 3G network, except it's even better because you have video AND audio. Since this would be using the data side of the plan, effectively this would be allowing people to get around the voice minutes of their plan, and the cell phone industry probably is not ready to change from their current voice minutes and voice/data split model.
You might object that Apple could have written the iPhone's iChat client so that it ONLY communicated with other iPhones, and not with MacOS's iChat, effectively making video calls "in-network" calls which are unlimited between AT&T customers as it is, but then people would cry "foul" over that decision as well. Also, even though iPhone is currently only AT&T *in the United States*, there will now be iPhones sold on other networks worldwide, so iChats would be (in theory) free between iPhones on different networks in different countries (!!) unless Apple put an artificial restriction on that ability as well, which would be uber-lame (but the phone companies wouldn't stand for free video/audio "calls" between phones in different companies, cutting into their profit gouging for international calls).
Unfortunately, that's just the state of things right now. Hopefully, in the (near?) future, the inertia of the way the market is going will force the issue at some point, probably at about the point that cell phone plans become "all-you-can-eat" in much the same way that landline VoIP accounts are, as mobile phone companies begin to leverage the universality of the internet to reduce the cost of national and international voice transport/trunking.
-- Nathan
TV with the difference
