What It’s Like Using FaceTime For Mac [Video]

FaceTime for Mac, which you could download instantaneously , works pretty flawlessly as long as you’ve got entries for your Address Book. Here’s how it looks doing Mac to Mac and Mac to iPhone. There’s even an iChat comparison.

Overall, it’s good. Apple kept the aspect ratio vertical by default if you’re doing Mac to Mac FT, but you may toggle landscape manually by doing Command + R. iPhone to Mac looks worse with regards to frame rate compared to Mac to Mac, but image quality is analogous. That claims good stuff concerning the camera inside the iPhone and not-so-good stuff concerning the camera inside the iMac/MacBooks.

You can, however, free up the 15FPS limit in iPhone 4′s FaceTime by jailbreaking your phone and installing a Cydia app called FaceTime Mod that lets the Framerate wander from 6FPS to 30FPS, in place of a locked 15. That’s better coverage for once you’re on 3G, and higher potential quality over Wi-Fi.

The only complaint I will be able to call to mind is that there’s no central directory for which email addresses are signed up for FaceTime, or maybe which friend is online. So you’ll should establish that you just’re FaceTiming in say, AIM, or Gchat, and then FaceTime. A standalone video chat service it truly is not, but I’m thinking Apple expects you to have FaceTime open at all times so you may get incoming calls from people.

FaceTime looks in regards to the same as iChat from what we see, which has been adequate for video chats for millions of folk. I’m surprised Apple made a third-party app for FaceTime in preference to just putting iChat into phones and iPods, but I assume it’s a setup for porting that FaceTime app to Windows users eventually? Either way, you’ll be able to download the beta today when you have Snow Leopard. [ Apple ]

Update: Whoa, you don’t even must have FaceTime open with a purpose to get incoming FaceTime calls! Also, FaceTime automatically pauses your iTunes whenever you get a decision. Neato.

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This post is tagged: aspect ratio, central directory, chat service, image quality, incoming calls, Snow leopard, windows users