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Comment by jeremyawon | Hacker News Reader

lack of front facing/any camera mystifies me

Well, you'd look ridiculous trying to point the thing at someone to take a picture. And the truth is that hardly anyone really wants videochat.

In my experience, people want videochat to look at their grandchildren.

The question is: are there a lot of them itching to spend several hundred dollars to do that via a wireless picture-frame in their lap?

In my experience those people are reasonably well served by sitting down at a PC with a webcam.

I agree. I think that the main impact of no-camera-on-iPad might be that fewer people use it as their only computer. (This might be by design.)

You can of course see your grandchildren via the iPad if they've got a laptop or desktop camera, it's the person with the iPad that won't be seen.

Wait for ver2

And I was thinking of buying this for my mom (who's never used a computer in her life) so we could videochat.

There are several cell phones with forward-facing camera. I think Nokia's internet tablet has one too.

You just don't hear much about them because, well, video conferencing is far less fun than it sounds.

I think a front facing camera was probably just too awkward to use. If you're sitting with your legs crossed resting the tablet on your knee a front facing camera isn't going to be showing your face. People will get a good look at your shirt though. If you have it laying down at a usable angle on a desk (say 30 degrees inclined) you're going to get a shot of the celling. I imagine this is something you'd see in the form of a third party accessory with a movable camera.

There are environments that limit or disallow cameras on devices, e.g., hospitals.

And yet every other device they make (basically) has one...

iPad 2.0

You have to leave some features for the next release.

Someone can make an accessory webcam.

Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth, and while Apple has a program for approving attached accessories, only a handful have made it to the public: Apple strangled a lot of products in their cribs.

Yup, the device is designed to have "no particular orientation", so the dock connector can be on top. I wouldn't be surprised to see a dock-connector iSight at some point.

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