Video conferencing coming to the iPhone?

It looks like Apple has been dabbling with the idea of having video conferencing features on the next iPhone. A 358 paged patent filed back in April 11th of 2008 discussed some of the specifics involved with this feature.

“In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition. In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display. In some embodiments, the position of the optical sensor can be changed by the user (e.g., by rotating the lens and the sensor in the device housing) so that a single optical sensor may be used along with the touch screen display for both video conferencing and still and/or video image acquisition.”

I don’t know about you, but this sounds really awesome. Video conferencing was probably the number one feature on my wish list before the iPhone 3G came out. As you can imagine, I’m sure the $199 price point would have been much higher if this type of feature had been added. And I’m sure there would be an additional data charge from AT&T for this “iChat” feature.