With the market saying 'no' to Nokia's Ovi Store, what do you think can be done to change this?We caught Jeb Brilliant of A Brilliant Blog during the show and I pointed the camera at him to find out what he thought of iPhones, Nokia’s latest and what equipment he was sporting.
Here’s the video:
Quick Chat with Jeb Brilliant from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.
I recently installed Dell Video Chat, following a tip from Andy Abramson. Dell Video Chat is the Dell branded version of SightSpeed and is another step in Dell’s bid to be a software company as well as a hardware company. The software is a free download and provides an improved user interface compared to SightSpeed’s own version. Both Windows and Mac versions are available.
Dell Video Chat offers free video calling to other Video Chat and SightSpeed users, plus regular phone calls to anyone and instant messaging to other Video Chat users. I’m using Video Chat with a Logitech QuickCam S5500 and the video quality is fantastic - much better than I expected from my past experience of using video calling. Multi-party chats are also available for $9.95 per month.
A neat feature is the ability to record a video message and send it to someone who isn’t online or doesn’t have Dell Video Chat installed. The recipient receives an email with a link where they can watch the video and also sign up for Video Chat. This is a nice feature for families who want to send impromptu video messages to each other.
As you’d expect, Video Chat offers the usual functionality to tune your video and sound settings plus the option to select different transmission speeds based on your Internet connection. There’s also a test call function to check you can communicate okay with the far end. Invoking ‘Control-S’ during a call brings up a statistics windows so you can compare your transmission speeds with the other party and monitor CPU usage and latency.
Whilst video calling to another Dell Video Chat user is free, making regular phone calls is chargeable and you need to top up your account with a minimum of $10.
The decision to use Dell Video Chat instead of other video calling products probably comes down to one of quality against ubiquity. If quality is important then Video Chat is well worth installing but you need to persuade your contacts to do the same. In the past I’ve not been a big fan of video calling because it’s always seemed a bit flaky but using Dell Video Chat a few times has inspired me to think again about when it would be useful. Now I need to persuade a few people to think likewise and download it!
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Jonathan’s also at Sevendotzero.
250,000 Trutap users are, this evening, finding that they can now use a heckuvalot more instant messenger services than they could yesterday to connect with each other. Given that Trutap has a massive amount users in developing countries who love the ultra cost efficient communications medium of IM on mobile, this is set to be a very welcome addition.
I know that quite a few Mobile Industry Review readers will be pleased to see that Trutap now have support for Google Talk too. Let me hand over to their CTO, Carl, for an update:
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Ewan,
Great catching up last week @ the Smartphone show, as promised, more Trutap news for you tonight…
The team here in Kings X have just rolled out a load more IM clients across Trutap (as promised in my last post on the site from the Hornet Content news). From today our global users, over 250K since launch 11 months ago, can now enjoy Facebook Chat, Google Talk (yeah, took us a while), Rediff Bol (big in India) and Jabber services, all alongside the existing MSN, Yahoo!, AIM and ICQ messenger services.
We’re not just finishing there though. In the next few weeks we’ll be adding even more IM clients, including MySpace, Gadu-Gadu, LiveJournal IM, Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, XMPP, Sametime and Zephyr. So in all, Trutap users will have the choice of about 17 IM clients, I think that’s fair to say, more than any other mobile application in the world! I also have some others planned after that…
Why? you might ask… We know that our users have their preferred IM clients and from research they don’t want to keep opening multiple apps one at a time, we bring all of them easily in one place. One of the best parts about the new IM clients is the fact that they’re already available in the current application, so users won’t need to upgrade the app to find their favourite IM.
Finally, Facebook haven’t released their chat client on the “people’s phones” yet, so I am expecting this to go down well with the main stream!
Speak soon, new client next…
Carl.
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Carl, nice one — we’re actually about to put up the vid we took of you last week at the Symbian Smartphone show. This is super news — you’re creating a truly valuable service there. I’m really looking forward to seeing the new Trutap client!
By the way, we recently added Carl to the Who’s Who in Mobile list. Check out his entry here.
