Considering the proliferation of 3G, WiFi, in-home broadband, and front-facing cameras on phones, you'd think that there'd be far more obvious ways to bridge video calls between phones and PCs -- but alas, it's virtually impossible, particularly in the States where carriers have a complete aversion to the topic. Enter
Fring -- one of the mobile industry's VoIP pioneers that has spread its love from Symbian to almost every smartphone platform worth mentioning over the years -- which is stepping out today with a new build for
S60 handsets that offers video support through Skype. The way we see it, this is great news for a couple of reasons: one, Skype is one of the few videoconferencing systems with widespread traction, and two, this suddenly makes front-facing cams useful to a whole swath of Nokia users on networks (ahem, AT&T and T-Mobile) that don't offer video calling themselves. Whether we actually use it is another story altogether, but hey, it's cool to have it if we absolutely must see your beautiful face
right now in stunning low fidelity. Follow the break for a video demo.
posted November 24th 2009 1:06PM
This is not the first P2P video over ip for s60 but it IS the first "free" one
http://octro.com/ have been offering this for some time and it works quite well. They did not have support for Skype (I wrote encouraging them to include this) ..
Thank you fring .. even though the N97 video orientation is screwed up .. please be fixing this ASAP k thx
@Chris
"particularly in the States where carriers have a complete aversion to the topic"
It's not that US carriers have an aversion to the topic. They're just waiting for Apple to invent front-facing cameras and video calling.
lol Niko Bellic........
Now, you iPhone fans wondering what is the FRONT facing camera??? Oops, just forgot to sell mine, need to cash for Nokia N900!
iVisit Mobile (http://www.ivisit.com/products_mobile) has been doing this for some time now on windows mobile, including multiparty video, though its nice that Fring incorporates Skype.
@EyalB
But you have to pay for that, Fring is free.
So it's not really the same.
Incredible this makes news.... iVisit and Octro have been doing this and iVisit supports up to 8 users even!
If you want something free with video, skype is still good for that but if you want to do it on the mobile or have multiple users in one screen, iVisit is still your best bet.
@eyalb, so true...
@pjy04
This makes the news because:
Ivisit and Octro have less than 5 Million users worldwide between them. Not many people have heard of or even use their services.
Skype alone has over 521 Million users worldwide and massive support over more devices, even proprietary devices, this does not factor in Fring users alone, which does Video chat even without Skype. Massive difference!
This will change the face of phone sex.
LITERALLY