You got your FaceTime in my voice call! You got your voice call in my FaceTime!
That's exactly the kind of situation that Apple's seeking to prevent with the launch of its new video-chatting feature for the iPhone 4, FaceTime. Upon announcement of the feature at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, speculation grew as to how FaceTime would interact with a typical voice call.
Given that one can initiate said video chatting while you're already engaged in a voice chat, what happens to the call when you elect to fire up your camera?
Does the active call stay hidden in the background while you chat face-to-face across your devices? If so, wouldn't that cost a user a significant amount of voice minutes off of his or her plan just to use the Wi-Fi-only video-chat feature?
As it turns out, the answer to these questions are a resounding no. An Apple spokesperson tipped off Buisness Insider today to conclusively state that the iPhone 4's FaceTime and voice calls are separate entities within the operating system.
Launch a FaceTime chat out of a normal voice call, and the phone will drop off said call in favor of the video streampreserving a user's cell plan minutes, but making it so that you'll have to redial your friend should your FaceTime chat have a hiccup.
It remains to be seen just how the iPhone 4's video-chat functionality will work once the technology is presumably unlocked for use over a standard 3G connection. Will that eat into a person's cell minutes instead? Will it just affect the data plan? And, perhaps most importantly, just how much space would a bandwidth-consuming video chat eat up within AT&T's new tiered data plans?