Facetime | featured news

After Juniper, we have another research company exploring the prospects of the mobile video calling services. It’s In-Stat which has found that this market’s total revenues will exceed $1 billion by 2015.

It seems more than a little odd to us that Apple hasn't bothered to make FaceTime compatible with its own longstanding desktop video chat service, iChat, but we've at least supposed that it's an inevitability with whatever upcoming Mac OS X update or software bundle that Apple deems appropriate. Now Mac4Ever, who was spot on with a pile of rumors last year, but hasn't succeeded with its recent prediction of an iLife '11 launch in August, is saying that Apple is prepping FaceTime both for Mac and PC.

Purported picture of a future iPad in testing with a front camera capable of FaceTime video calls.

It’s been widely assumed that Apple will start to roll out their FaceTime real-time communication protocol to more and more of their mobile devices (and possibly their computers), but until now, we’ve been in the dark on how this will actually work. After all, there are no phone numbers to call on an iPod touch or iPad...