If you’ve been watching Sports Center today, you may have noticed the continuing Apple iPhone 4 FaceTime marketing campaign that is being shoved down our retinas.
Apple FaceTime makes it a lot easier for Pedo Bear to video chat
Actually as I was typing this, one of the commercials played right behind me on the tube. There are about four new variants: Big News, Meet Her, Haircut and my favorite Smile.
Big News is about woman and a man who are presumably married and attempting to conceive (Ah! its playing again!). Meet Her is about a grandfather meeting his grandchild for the first time. Haircut shows a woman that thinks the haircut she got is too short but that her boyfriend or husband ends up liking. Finally we come to Smile, where a daughter is reluctant to smile due to the fact that she just got braces.
Having the demented and sinister mind that I do, the Smile commercial made me think of how easy FaceTime makes it for that pedo bear to talk to young girls. Pedo bears surely would meet the FaceTime requirements since they would be at home all the time and most likely would have access to WiFi. Sure its a little out there but you have to think about all the possibilities, especially the bad ones.
Sorry Junior Daddy Spent Diaper Money On two IPhones
At least the first commercials before the release of the iPhone 4 told you specifically in fine print during the commercial that FaceTime only works with WiFi.
FaceTime requires iPhone 4 and WiFi to work
All of the newest commercials wait until the end of the ad to inform you of the required ingredients that make FaceTime possible. Maybe in future releases Apple can work something out where they can enable 3G with FaceTime.
Rightly so, most of the commercials show people at home. This makes perfect sense because its about the only place besides free hotspots that allow you complete and realiable WiFi access. As gimmicky as it may be, I believe FaceTime is executed nicely on the iPhone 4. As usual Apple simplifies the process for the average idiot user out there and it is convenient to have something work right out of the box. All you have to do is call and click with your finger activate the feature.
At the same time, this is where Apple fails. I would have been extremely impressed if they had found a solution that allows the FaceTIme to work smoothly with Skype video calling . There are millions of people on Skype but instead Apple chose their usual fascist methods and went with a proprietary feature.
Skype has told Engadget that they are not interested in FaceTime but rather to work together with Apple.
We are not considering FaceTime as a technological platform for video calling in our own products. However, given Apple’s statement about FaceTime being an open platform, we are looking forward to see how it unfolds. We look forward to working with Apple to make sure the millions of users of Skype on the iPhone get the best possible experience when it comes to video calls on mobile devices and beyond.
Luckily Apple has approved third-party video calling applications such as Fring, which allows Skype video calling over 3G. In fact it has been so successful that Fring has had to temporarily shut down Skype access to “free up capacity.”
Simple Tip
If you’re the only one with an iPhone 4 that meets the FaceTime requirements but don’t have anyone to test it with there is hope. Apple has setup a FaceTime support line 1-888-FACETIME, just dial it with your iPhone 4 and an Apple representative will more than gladly test out the feature with you. The service is available from 8am-to-8pm CDT.
While the commercials may strike close to home showing us visually the possibilities of a convenient and fool-proof method of video calling. FaceTime is currently a handicapped feature because unlike other video calling solutions, it only works when you meet two required conditions: an iPhone 4 and WiFi.
For now we can take advantage of third party applications like Fring to place Skype video calls over 3G connections to other devices such as laptop and other smart phones.
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