Home is probably not where your camera is

It seems that you guys are full of questions; I wish we could say that we—like RadioShack—have answers, but right now, we mainly just have speculation (it’s a form of answer, but not one that you should use to make financial investments, sweeping pronouncements, or wagers with your significant other, unless you are prepared to be utterly and totally wrong and spend the rest of your life taking out the garbage).

Reader Mark chimes in with a theory about the “mysterious” home button:

Now, I had always assumed that the square shape in the center of the Home button was the phone’s microphone, since it is situated about where you would speak on the phone and it seems to be open. But, I was surprised to learn from Apple’s new 20 minute guided tour that the mic is actually inside the cluster of 23 tiny holes on the left-hand side of the iPhone’s very bottom edge. Those two clusters of holes had always just seemed like two stereo speakers to me until then.

So if the microphone is not in the center of the Home button, why is there a square cut-out in it??? Well, to me it looks exactly like the tiny square cut-out at the top of all of the Macs on the market… the iSight camera!

Now could it be that if you rotated the iphone upside down, so that the home button (with mysterious square) were at the top of the viewing screen, like on an iMac, MacBook or MacBook Pro, it becomes iChat with built-in iSight camera?!!!

Sorry, Mark, but the magic 8-ball says “Very doubtful.” Jobs showed off the home button and microphone during the iPhone’s introduction in January; rumors allege that Jobs had originally wanted no buttons at all on the phone, but eventually relented and acquiesced to the mechanical home button.

From a design standpoint, it makes sense: as the guided tour says, pushing the home button from any place in the iPhone’s hierarchy shoots you back to home—it’s the iPhone equivalent of clicking your ruby slippers together three times. Having that always available via an easy-to-find clicky mechanical control is sure to be a lifeline for iPhone users panicking about getting out of the app they were in.

As for the shape’s resemblance to the iSight, it is similar, but I’d chalk it up to Apple’s design aesthetic: remember their long-standing love affair with rounded corners. The iPhone takes a number of design cues from the iPod already, so taking one from the Mac line is hardly a surprise. Add in the lack of an iChat app for video-conferencing, and the presence of the camera on the back already, and theories about video-chat are likely to go the way of GPS positioning.

That said, we’d believe that video conferencing might be a down-the-road feature for the iPod, but it’s probably going to be a while before we get “iContact.” As it were.