I came across this Techcrunch article via Twitter this morning, which got me thinking about where iPhone applications and accessories could (or maybe should) be heading.

The article is about the Flip video cameras- compact pocket-sized camcorders.

And the iPhone has something that the Flip will never realistically have, cellular and wifi connectivity that lets you upload your videos immediately. No need to sync back with your base computer to edit the video and upload it. You can do basic editing right on the iPhone, and publish it to YouTube immediately. As an added bonus, that video can be geo-stamped via the phones GPS capability.

One of the features of the iPhone 3.0 operating system is the ability for applications to tie in with accessories. Now, the camera built into a phone is always going to be compared to a dedicated camera- whether a compact still or video camera, or a bigger camcorder or SLR. The tiny blob of glass that a phone has for a lens that is right next to the tiny sensor is always going to be inferior to the bigger lens and sensor in a dedicated device.

But why should it be a competition? Why couldn’t they work together? Why couldn’t a dedicated camera connect via a USB to Dock cable, Bluetooth or WiFi to the iPhone, allowing the iPhone to act as a controller? The same touch-screen autofocus that the iPhone 3Gs has could be used as a remote control for a dedicated camera. The iPhones internet connection and GPS could be used to stamp locational data and upload to Flickr or YouTube. Perhaps with existing cameras ability to send pictures via USB, the ability to upload via an iPhone application could be as straightforward to achieve as selling a USB to iPhone dock cable…

If Apple chose not to allow it through the iPhone or Apps store (say, because they saw it as a reason not to buy the more expensive iPhone models) then it could be a killer feature for another less restrictive mobile platform- Android, for example.

We’ve still seen remarkably few applications that make the most of the new operating system- I’m waiting for a blogging application that will let me select a chunk of text and then add HTML tags to it, let me know through push alerts when I have comments or trackbacks (through the Push alert system) or a Twitter app that will let me copy the URL of a web page I’m looking at. Accessories are obviously another step away.

It’s an opportunity either for an iPhone developer to get first-mover advantage, or another platform to steal a march on the iPhone.

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