First Facetime

David Monagle

I’ll admit that the feature I was least excited about in the iPhone 4 was the front facing camera. I’ve had mobiles that could do video calls before but wasn’t all that impressed with low grade jerky video at high call costs.

So last night I pick up my iPhone and call a friend in Sydney. She tells me that she got her iPhone 4 that day. So we are both in a Wifi hot spot, I press the Facetime button on the phone and next thing we are looking at each other. Talking face to face. Over the next hour and a half I chatted to her, moving around my house, sitting on the couch and even switching to the front facing camera several times as I showed her around my house and let her “talk” to my dog. It is much more personable than voice only. Only a couple of times did the audio glitch at all, I blame that on my ADSL 1 connection, but it was not overly disruptive. And on top of all of that, we had the added bonus of not being charged for the conversation.

I use Skype frequently for both video and audio calls. I’m a big fan, but it has its drawbacks. I’m a mobile person and Skype performs best on the desktop. It’s okay when I’m at home and within hearing range of my computer, but quite often I pre arrange Skype calls. Not too impractical, but it can be improved on. Skype is available on the iPhone. But it is slow to be updated and is only a “passable” experience. Performance is not what it is on the desktop — even though it only does audio calls. The audio is patchy, there is a noticeable delay and I experience frequent dropouts. All of this on the same internet connection as my Facetime chat.

Skype is also a closed standard. Fring recently released a version of their app to do Skype video on the iPhone. Skype threatened them and they withdrew it. This leads me to the final advantage of Facetime. Apple has proposed it as an open standard. Meaning every handset maker, every software developer can choose to adopt it (indeed there are talks of Skype adopting it). This will level the playing field and can only be good for consumers.

Facetime’s integration is seamless, which is probably what will lead users to use it. It is only in it’s infancy but I expect it will spread and expand rapidly over the next few years.