Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam | Hacker News Reader

Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

wired.com

31 pointsfjabre17 comments

I'm buying if it does. I'm on the bubble right now due to lack of camera and multitasking, but multitasking can be solved using software if someone manages to jailbreak it. Skype video chat on this thing would be really nice.

Well everyone is calling this "A computer for their Mom." Newslfash: My mother is in her late sixties and she uses Skype to talk to friends all around the world. My co-parent's brother lives in Belgium. My brother lives in Winnipeg. Guess what my children use to talk to their uncles? Guess what our respective parents use to talk to their sons?

Skype is software everybody's mother uses. A computer for my Mom has a camera for Skype.

Agreed, my mum uses skype to talk to me (I live in Canada, she's in the UK). It's not a device for my mum, because even for the applications she uses (my dad worked in IT since before the 90's, it took until the 2000's to get her on a computer, and until 2008 to get her on facebook) it's simplistic. For my father, who did web development and application development (before then he was working with some of the first computer controlled fuel injectors in vehicles, so I have no clue what language that would have been programmed in), it's far too simplistic.

I believe one of my cousins even got my grandmother (in her 90's!) onto the internet to pay her bills. Telephone banking with a nearly deaf woman who has no hope in hell of understanding an Indian woman, and no chance the Indian woman is going to understand a 90 year old Geordie. I doubt it would be hard to teach her how to turn on skype, meaning the iPad would be below her uses.

When my parents moved from the US to Japan several years ago I showed them Skype. Now they use Skype more than I ever have and even bought a netbook because they could use the camera for video calls.

Agree. I won't get a first generation of these for myself, but I'm considering one for my grandmother - > simple touchscreen, some shortcuts set up by me, and then skype video and a flickr account the family can access would change her life.

It may or it may not.

The comments point out that it could easily be just an ambient light sensor, which is actually listed on the spec sheet.

This meme has to die.

A photo response from John Gruber's Twitter feed: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/roncassel.jp...

And every one of those cameras sends a live feed back to the plants that assembled the iPad, in Communist China!

(Sorry, just had to indulge my paranoid side after seeing the story about the Firefox CNNIC CA cert.)

Looking back at the Twitter feed, it looks to me like he just found the picture amusing (it was a retweet from John Siracusa's feed).

That's just the power button with the pad being held upside down.

Edit: Yep http://images.theage.com.au/2010/02/01/1084401/steve-jobs-42...

I sure hope it does. I just bought a bunch of stock in a company that makes nose hair clippers. Forget the App Store -- this is the real gold rush.

Looks like an artifact to me. If you look real hard there is a similar artifact on the right size of the black border just below the upper-right corner of the device. It's probably just a coincidence that the artifact is in the place were a webcam would go.

Also: mark my words, this sucker is shipping with handwriting recognition.

Apple handwriting recognition is pretty bad, and you would need a special stylus for the multitouch screen and where would you put the stylus...

I found the newton recognition to be great. Do you mean in OS X? I thought it was similar tech.

You assume you need a stylus!

I doubt it

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