This is interesting because it shows how far behind the US is in the telecoms space.<p>In Europe this has been a basic feature of all 3G phones for around five years. If you want to videochat you just press the button and call somebody up using their normal phonenumber.<p>It was pretty hyped up, but it never really caught on because there simply aren't that many usecases where you want to videochat with people on the go. Especially as you have to hold out your phone in fromt of you in a somewhat awkward way. Now it's just old and tired.
"iPhones then create a direct peer to peer connection over the internet. The iPhones deal with all IP addresses, firewalls, NAT issues automatically."<p>Isn't that impossible without an intermediate server?<p>Edit: OK, thinking a bit, I never looked into the Skype trick much, but I would guess, send a request to a server (that doesn't respond). Then you have an open connection/port listening to the response from the server. If you can tell the other party about that "hole", it can send a packet across the firewall.<p>While for Skype that is done by a server (if necessary), the iPhone could send the information via the phone line?<p>As I said, no idea how the details work, just a rough idea. Or maybe they just use a server.
It will be <i>really</i> successful when you can video chat with any device whether it's an iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android, anything. And when it works over 3G.
I have a sneaky suspicion they might be pinging some switchboard with self-reported telephone numbers... and thus there could be some privacy blowback (mapping phone numbers to mobile IPs) or potential for phone-number impersonation (at least until you show your face) in FaceTime.