His Facetime A Significant Iphone Development?

By Author: chirag Thumar
Total Articles: 62
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Though cell phones have offered video call features even before the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it did not fire the imagination of users. Why? Even if you discounted mobile networks bandwidth issues and inferior video quality, it's not necessarily the most practical way to interact with someone. Imagine a scenario, where you are expecting a call from a prospective employer for the first time. You're at home and you don't know exactly when the call will come. So far on voice calls, looking right for a call has not been your priority. Then, why will you want to take that call on a video phone, where you might be seen with interview-inappropriate clothes and unkempt hair?

To add to it, there is the cost of video data, which is comparatively larger than voice data and not cheap on mobile networks. Take a 450-minute cell phone plan for example. At US$ 60, you could text and make 15-minute calls every day. But if you were to make video calls, your plan might cost you between US$ 75-85. So video calling lost its appeal.

Then, what made iPhone developers develop FaceTime, a video call application that can only be ...
... used among new Apple product users? Not all Apple users are privileged to use FaceTime. iPhone 4 and 4S users can call each other or call Mac, iPad 2, and iPod touch users over Wi-Fi.

Before getting any further into the details of FaceTime, take a moment to think about when we actually use video-calling EVEN if it were not over a phone. We'd like to SEE our friends and family across locations and with them we don't really bother too much about our appearances. In fact, we'd like to share with them, views to our world and vice versa. And, we make video calls when it costs very little and we have a decent quality web cam to go with decent quality visuals provided by a good broadband. Mobile broadband is too expensive a platform for it. Wi-Fi networks including hotspots on the other hand are free or cheaper. Then, again, people commonly use an internet connection with a Wi-Fi router for freedom of movement within their homes and to enable all internet users to connect to a common internet connection.

Apple understood this when it developed FaceTime, an iPhone application development targeted at friends and family, meant to be used only over Wi-Fi networks and the internet. All you needed was their name and number on your contact list or if you were calling an iPad 2, iPod touch, or a Mac user, you needed their email address. A call would go through on all your Apple devices.

Bypassing cellular network services also meant taking on cellular network providers, who couldn't charge customers for what they were getting. Of course it was not all free. You would have to pay your internet provider for data usage. But it would be much cheaper than paying for mobile broadband data services. To find out the data usage for a FaceTime call, 9to5mac.com put two iPhone 4s through a five-minute FaceTime call with 'lots of movement.' It found that it used data at the rate of 3 MB per minute. That is quite a bit!

Meanwhile, other iPhone developers have also been busy jail breaking the phone to make FaceTime available to iPad 1 users and to make FaceTime available over 3G.

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