I was at Kings Cross St Pancras last night about to head out to Paris. I decided to use the WiFi there to make a quick FaceTime call to my little boy. Baby Archie is almost 10 months old. (I think we need to see him walk before we can start referring to him as a toddler, right?)
Archie was about to go for his bath so I thought I’d call and say hello. I put on my headset and called my wife.
She answered and I spent about 5 minutes having a chat with her and making faces at Archie which he found hilarious.
I was standing in the corner by the place where people were embarking on to the platform and out of the corner of my eye, I was staggered by the amount of people who walked by openly staring.
I want to be clear — I wasn’t doing a Lord Flashheart, standing legs astride, codpiece out to the world, in the middle of the Eurostar terminal, shouting at the iPhone. I was standing in a corner, deliberately out of the way.
I think the fact I was holding up the iPhone to my face certainly looked strange. That attracted the first glance. And when people saw I was in the middle of a video call, that got the second, third or continual glance. Some folk were astounded.
Some people were actually craning their necks.
And some of them were carrying iPhones! FaceTime shouldn’t be a surprise to them…
It moved me to record a SocialCam video just after the call:
Terence, I’m with you — isn’t it silly that some folk with a 3G-video
capable device will be saying to each other ‘oh, I wish I could FaceTime’
😉
The problem, of course, is that it’s still stupidly expensive. And — as you
point out — it’s not aaaaaactually that good because of a whole host of
factors that can interfere. Ah dear.