Facetime

[Von Luck]

As an Apple hater of long standing, it pains me somewhat to admit that I've purchased an iphone and that Facetime is awesome.

A friend who now lives in New Zealand dropped me his new iphone mobile number, so I add him to contacts then prod the facetime button - a couple of seconds later I'm having a lag free, good quality video chat with someone the other side of the world and it's not costing either of us a penny. Witchcraft.

I wonder if the telecos realise the huge impact this could have on their future business models. Sure you can do the same with Skype, but this is even more seamless and if it spreads to other devices could start hitting mobile companies margins.

 

[Von Luck]

OP are you sure that the facetime call was free for you and him??...reason i ask is because my sis in law in Canada reckons its not even though ive said to her that it is as long as shes connected to a WIFI network.

Definitely free as long as you initiate it as a Facetime call (rather than start a standard voice call and then cut over to Facetime).

 

[Von Luck]

Quality seemed good to me - good image quality and hardly any latency, which is amazing considering it was a UK to NZ link.

 

[Von Luck]

Didn't notice the specific impact of facetime on battery life, but my usage yesterday was:

0700 - fully charged (100%)

2 hrs of video watching
Numerous email checks
Some web browsing
4 or 5 app downloads
Quite a lot of general faffing about
10 minutes facetime convo

When I hit the sack at 2300 my battery was showing 49% left. That's with 3G and Wifi on but Bluetooth and auto brightness off (brightness manually set to about 80%).

How long should it take to connect once you've accepted a call?

It took 3 or 4 seconds to connect for me.