Live Video Chat Comes To iPhone…..Pointless!!

Over the last couple of days we have seen a new sensation burst forth from the App Store in the form of “Live Video Chat”.

The first was Knocking™ Live Video, an entirely new app that boasts the ability to connect 2 iPhone users via live video feed. Not much to the app really, you enter some details, including a unique, when it’s gone it’s gone type username. You then add your friends and initiate video calls over wifi or 3G.

In the release notes, The Pointy Heads™ say this;

Start a Knocking™ live video broadcast with anyone, anywhere on iPhone. Just add friends to your Knocking™ viewers list and open the Knocking™ camera. That’s it! EASY! Use Knocking™ live as long as you like.

This is what every iPhone user has been waiting for. Even 3G iPhones can send and receive live video broadcasts. Yes, and iPod Touch’s can receive! Knocking™ live has been tested for reliability and will deliver optimum performance everywhere carrier coverage is adequate.

Sadly, since i got my hands on this app i have had little success getting it to work. For the first 24hrs, the server was non existent which is not so surprising really. Since then i am now able to connect to the app, and add my buddies. However, when attempting to connect to my buddy, both on wifi using the iPhone 3Gs at both ends, we were presented with a “connecting” alert for far too long, forcing us to close the app to get rid of the alert so we could try again.

Still having no joy, and feeling very unimpressed, we decided to move on to the other app boasting live video calling, which is of course Fring, which was just updated with this added feature.

So here we are again with 2 iPhone 3Gs’, both on wifi. First test was over the fring network itself – sound but no video, second test was over the skype network – sound but no video, and finally over the Msn network – “video calling not allowed over Msn”. We tried calling both ways…..nothing!

It seems that this new “feature” has a long way to go, no matter which app it is, and more to the point is pretty pointless without a front facing camera on the iPhone!! The lengths you would have to go to to get anything like real video calling are clear if the first image is anything to go by.

If at a later date we get either of these apps to work as advertised we will take this somewhat poor review down and redo it, but until then……