Seeing as how it’s Friday, we thought we’d end the week with a little Public Service Announcement for all you new iPhone 4 (iPhour) users out there scratching your head as to why the FaceTime video call option suddenly disappeared from your new Apple smartphone. We’ve been getting a good number of readers asking us why their iPhone 4 just seemingly decided to no longer work with the FaceTime video chat feature that Steve Jobs so enthusiastically announced at WWDC 2010. The problem? You probably restored your previous iPhone’s backup to your iPhour.
You see, Apple makes it easy to transfer all your data from one iPhone to another. If, for example, you upgraded your iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4, all you had to do was backup your 3GS through iTunes and restore your iPhone 4 with that backup. After doing so, your new iPhour (iPhone + 4 = “iPhour”) will essentially be a clone of your outgoing 3GS – all your music, apps, emails, calendar events, passwords and even text messages will be synced. That also means that all your settings will be carried over to iPhour – including FaceTime settings. And, therein lies the problem.
Your iPhone, iPhone 3G, or iPhone 3GS doesn’t have a front-facing camera, and so doesn’t have the FaceTime video chat option. When you synchronize your iPhour with your old iPhone data, iTunes will automatically toggle the FaceTime setting to “off” as the default setting. The solution:
- Navigate your iPhone 4 to Settings > Phone and re-enable FaceTime
It’s that simple.
This concludes are weekly public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.