Front facing camera on new iPhone?
New patent diagram suggests the possibility
Over at MacRumors they’ve been looking through Apple’s new patent applications (Apple loves patent applications), which have been filed in response to the company’s research into improving the user interface while the user is in motion.
These patents involve some complex motion sensing, including bezel interfaces and dynamically adjusted onscreen controls that change to increase dexterity when motion is detected (when you’re jogging, taking pictures on the roller coaster, or texting while driving, for example).
In amongst all this technical pre-pandering is a schematic of the iPhone, which has an interesting addition to its fascia - a forward facing camera.
Labelled as sensor 180 (just above the speaker grille), the patent application does say "in some implementations, the camera lens and sensor 180 can be located on the back surface of the mobile device", so it’s not proof positive of a front-facing camera for video calls, though neither is it concurrent with the device’s rear mounted CCD which is labelled as device 220.
Speculation about video calling on the iPhone has been one of the most talked about features of the handset’s much-rumoured hardware update, so it’ll be interesting to see if this pans out to be the case.
In our opinion, this looks quite believable. Nice.
