Do you have a relative or a close friend who lives out of town and is unable to come to a birthday party? Here is a tip — with your iPhone 4, you can invite them to the party.
A few weeks ago, I was with family members celebrating my mother's birthday. My brother lives in another state so he couldn't join us, but thanks to my iPhone, he was able to be a part of the celebration.
Although my brother doesn't have an iPhone 4, he does have a Mac, so I asked him to start up the free FaceTime program for the Mac. Using my iPhone 4, I initiated a FaceTime video chat with his e-mail address and I propped up the iPhone so that it was facing my mother and the birthday cake. My mother and the rest of the family could see my brother on the iPhone screen, and he could see the rest of us thanks to the iPhone's front-facing camera. He was able to join us to sing Happy Birthday and watch my Mom blow out the candles (with considerable assistance from my kids, for whom blowing out birthday candles is at the top of their list of favorite activities). The whole experience worked great, and for a few seconds there, I felt like I was living in an Apple TV commercial.
Video chat is nothing new, and I suppose I could have accomplished the same thing using a laptop computer with a built-in camera, but I didn't happen to have a laptop computer in my pocket, whereas the iPhone is always there. I was able to use FaceTime because I had Wi-Fi at the time and my brother uses a Mac, but even if I had been relying on 3G and my brother had been using a PC, I could have used the recently-updated free Skype app for the iPhone to do the same thing. If you can use FaceTime, the quality is better than Skype.
(If the next version of the iPad has a camera and supports FaceTime, perhaps for the next birthday party my brother can appear on a much larger screen. Louder speakers on the iPad would also help.)
I know a lot of iPhone 4 owners who have never used it to conduct a video chat, and frankly I don't use FaceTime very often either. Nevertheless, when the occasion presents itself, try to remember that the easy-to-use video conferencing capabilities of the iPhone 4 can make a special moment even more special.
