I’m currently considering the iPhone4 or the Blackberry Bold 9700. It’s a hard choice but I am leaning to the iPhone…

Makes me wanna consider the Android!

Paul Freeman-Yeah I played with some of the earlier incarnations of video chatting on phones and I found the experience to be lacking. The ones I tried were coming across at 12 frames per second and were low resolution and just not an improvement over an ordinary cell call. Face Time to me is the future, because once truly high speed wireless networks are in place, Face Time, or a variation on it, will be how we make all of our calls. The video component isn’t even the big deal here. It’s the improvement in audio quality and the movement to a system where voice and data are no longer bifurcated in the artificial way that they are today. That’s the future of cellular communications that I was referring to.

But, one thing that constantly amazes me is how people are so impressed by FaceTime.

I don’t know what the situation is in the US, but here in the UK 3G phones have had face to face video calls since the very first phones came out almost a decade ago. No one uses it of course, but it’s as easy to access as it is the iPhone (Contact, option, make video call on a Sony Ericsson) and it works across multiple phone providers and models, over a normal cell connection.

And Facetime seems no easier then using Skype due to the constraint of WiFi only. With the small exception of not needed to pre register.

So to me, it seems not so much a glimpse into the future, but a look back at the past which people choose not to use, and by ignoring existing standards and creating new ones it doesn’t seem a very consumer friendly way of going forward with a technology.

I own a 3G and a 3GS and hate Apple’s controlling stance and their buggy firmware/software. Although they are slowly getting better and iOS4 with iTunes 9.2 has solved some bugs wrt handling of large libraries, but many bugs still remain.

And now that there are viable Android alternatives, I never plan on buying another iPhone due to their continued crAppie politics and the fact that you don’t actually own the phone you payed for but are instead borrowing it indefinitely from Apple.

But this was a good review with lots of useful information. And as soon as Apple quits fighting the jailbreak movement and pushing their DRM crap (and I do mean pushing in the sense of drugs to a junkie), I plan to reconsider my aforementioned decision.

BrianM-Making and receiving calls isn’t all we do with our iPhones. When I’m browsing the internet, or doing anything that doesn’t require an awful lot of typing, I’ll hold the phone as depicted in my left hand and use my right hand to peck at the screen. The issue extends to data as well, because when you lose reception, you lose your data connection.