It wasn’t a secret at all, before today’s unveiling, everyone knew the iPhone 4 would have a front-facing camera. To me, front-facing camera meant iChat for iPhone. Well, I was wrong, and Apple found an easier way to implement it.
Putting iChat on the iPhone, would have meant to use either an AOL or a MobileMe account. I thought it could have been a good strategy for Apple to try pushing more people to sign-up for MobileMe through iChat. However, not everyone is ready to spend $99/year for it. Apple could have offered a ‘lite’ version, but what’d be the point? Creating an account just to use a software is too tedious for most people, and would refrain a lot from using the service.
Forcing people to sign up to a service to use video-conferencing is the way we have been used to. Yet Apple found a better way: no sign-up.