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Up until now, whenever I wanted to make funny faces at my boss but didn’t have the Wi-Fi connection necessary for Facetime, I used the Fring app over 3G. Now I’ve got a new favourite app for those times: Tango.
Given all the hype from Apple’s iPhone 4 launch around the introduction of FaceTime, you’d be forgiven for thinking that video calling on mobile phones was actually a new thing. But the truth is that, in Australia at least, video calling has been around since Hutchison Telecoms launched the Three network over here in 2003.
When I was a kid one of my favourite shows was The Jetsons. I used to love it when George would answer a call from his boss Mr Spacely and you could see Spacely’s face getting redder and redder as he chastised George for some irrelevant or minor misdemeanour. Back then, I used to wonder if we’d ever get video calling. Well, we did but it wasn’t quite as I’d imagined as a child.
Based on an SDK which doesn’t differentiate between the iPhone and iPad, folks at Engadget say they’ve confirmed that the iPhone OS 3.2 has “rudimentary” support for video calling and file downloading. Too soon for any excitement at all?
