Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from paki now to come you remember way back when you were a kid and when you wanted to make a phone call you actually had to pick up a phone that have like a cord on it that plugged into a wall well some of you might others had antennas that you had to pull out we're really long well today we've got cellular phones and smart phones smart phones of course are smarter than normal phones and today what I would like to show you as a feature of some of the higher-end smartphones and that's video calling or to be more precise video chat so let's go take a look at video chat using kik or a quick depending on how you want to pronounce it between the mytouch 4G on t-mobile's hspa+ 4g network and the sprint epic 4g on sprint's 4g network let's see how it looks alright so over here we have the tmobile mytouch 4G connected to their hspa+ network which should get me near 4G speeds they haven't deployed it fully in my location so we're just going to have to trust that it's a little bit better if you're in a more populated area where they've done a full rollout of 4G over here we've got the sprint samsung epic 4g and unfortunately 4g where i am kind of rolls in and out so right now we're connected to 3g we'll see what it's like now why do I mention 3g 4g well first and foremost these phones can do video calling or video chat is a better way to to say it over well not Wi-Fi and and I'm kind of doing that I'm kind of mentioning that just to to poke it Apple a little bit because on their devices you can only video chat over Wi-Fi not over cellular data which is a kind of self-defeating if you ask me but it's a carrier thing if your carrier doesn't have the bandwidth to be able to support video calling which obviously takes more bandwidth than just straight audio calling well they're not going to want that to happen I don't know if that's the case with AT&T or not but for the purpose of this video will say that it is and if we've got a representative from AT&T watching this video who would like to clarify that we've got comments down below I'm glad to receive that feedback but let's take a look first and foremost each one of these phones comes with a custom version of qik or quick and I'm going to make fun of it by saying it both ways for the purpose of this video you know because I do that kind of stuff now custom versions that's kind of goofy in my opinion you can go out to the market you can download this app just search for qik and you can download it use it on your phone now it's not going to be all that useful if you don't have a front facing camera both of these phones have a front facing camera t-mobile g2 on the other hand doesn't have a front facing camera that doesn't mean that you can't use it it just means that when you're looking at the person you're talking to on the screen they're going to be looking at whatever is on the back side of your phone in this case this nice high density polyethylene tabletop if you're walking down the street they're going to be looking at the person's back or head or whatever is walking in front of you so keep that in mind that's not all that this can do of course you can do video chat you can also record and share your life as it happens now I've mentioned this app particularly in the past if you're ever involved in any kind of a police or security issue or any place that you might want to get a record of what's going on this app is great because once you have it installed and setup you can stream that information to their website in real time so that if something were to happen say your phone was confiscated as evidence and I don't know maybe the data got erased or destroyed I know that would never happen in today's society but if it did you still have what happened available to you out on the website so very nice to have an off-site copy there and it's there just to help keep people more honest don't use this in any way shape or form that might be illegal or inappropriate or unethical there's my disclaimer alright next is you've got video mail or messages which are basically the same thing it's a voicemail with video on it doesn't get much simpler than that and then of course my videos and video gallery which again same it's what you've already recorded so you can watch it later stream back down to your phone or played from the local copy but we're not interested in any of that what we're interested in is video chat now back to what I said these are both custom versions of the app what's unfortunate is when I went out to the market to update these apps there were updates for both of them when i updated the qik app for the sprint samsung epic 4g it broke I don't know what else to say force closes every time you try and record a video so update fail luckily I was able to uninstall the update and go back to the version that came pretty installed on the phone and everything was working again so there was an hour or so of my life in troubleshooting that I hope the guy's a kick are listening to and will fix over here on the mytouch 4G the version that came on the phone I never got to test because it came up and said hey there's an update the update just happens to work so okay enough with the blabber let's get right to the videos alright in a previous video I showed you a little bit about or I talked a little bit about how this was probably one of the most frustrating apps that i have ever ever ever used and I have spent literally hours and hours trying to get this to work my contacts have a whole bunch of people in them and apparently nobody in my contacts is on the the kick network and I don't know why because I know several of them are which is kind of frustrating second thing that's frustrating is this is a separate app that I have to launch so I have to go in and try and i have to say i want to video chat with someone to be able to video chat with someone which is kind of lame instead i'd like to open my dialer dial somebody's number and have it ask me hey do you want a video or do you want to audio and have it do the call that way we're not quite there yet but hopefully soon so what I've done is I have Jessica she's my daughter she's in the other room again on the sprint network and I'm over here on the t-mobile network and we're going to go ahead and make this call now to do that I had to type in her username and that was kind of a pain in the neck because you might not know their username you might just know their phone number all right so I'm gonna go ahead and connect to my daughter who is used my wife's account her name is Jessica let's see how that works go to recent calls and tap that and you can hear it ringing on my end and there it is you can see me and the camera I've been the upper left and Jessica can you hear me now here's the funny thing that Jessica and I just learned on the mytouch 4G it automatically broadcast video and audio over to the receiving end is that right Jessica okay now the funny thing is over on the the epic 4g version of the same app it's still it's still kick or quick or however you pronounce it you have to press and hold this little button see that button down there in the corner which looks a little bit different it says talk on it and if you want to talk to the other person on the other side using the epic 4g you have to press and hold that and release it just like a walkie talkie which is kind of goofy so Jessica I'm noticing can you hold the camera back a little bit more so we can see you and you know maybe smile a little bit see there you go now how old are you Jessica Jessica is almost 10 years old everybody so in a really nice girl make sure you're nice in the comments what do you think about video calling is is this something that's going to replace say you know picking up a phone and calling your friends yes she says it definitely is going to do that I don't think that that this app is quite ready for mainstream I mean you and I have been trying to figure this out the same app on two different phones for for how long has it been now so we've been working for half an hour to try and get this phone to connect to your phone and you and I have been practicing in the same room together so kind of difficult we're going to try one other thing and this is a competing app that doesn't come pre-installed on either phone but we're going to see how it works for both usability and an audio and video quality so we're going to go ahead and do that here in just a minute so Jessica thank you very much i'm going to go ahead and let you go and I will see you in just a little bit alright so let's try it with another video calling app in this case it is fring I don't really like their interface it looks not complete I've complained about that before but you know it's kind of a kind of unique and novel in this case we can do a text talk which is like instant messaging the phone call which is void and then a video chat so we'll go ahead and do video and it's dialing her up right now has kind of a funny ringtone and look there's Jessica Jessica can you hear me yes she can hear me now this is over hspa+ on my end but ah the the sprint 4G on her end it just isn't working right so it's just 3g now you'll notice over here I've got a little kind of a white window now Jessica can you see me sorta you can just see the table right so that's unfortunate what what fring has is they've got a platform that kind of works I mean it dials it connects it behaves just like you'd expect it to but the mytouch 4G isn't supported yet so the front-facing camera doesn't work now and I'm sure they'll have an update for it hopefully Susan later but Jessica can you see me now and yes she can now see me but I can't see her so we're going to have to keep flipping the phone around like this and that kind of awkward so home run for fring getting this call to work just right off the bat something that the kick couldn't do but unfortunately they don't have the front facing camera working so I'm still no positive solution in that point but in any event Jessica thank you very much for being my spokesmodel for the day alright so there we go it's still a little bit in its infancy this whole video calling thing but you can very clearly see how not to do it and that's what this kick video chat it doesn't work well at all I don't know if that's because we're going across different networks or there are different versions of the app or what I don't really know why it seems like a relatively simple concept to employ but they haven't done it and they failed miserably at least in my experience if your experience has been better I would love to hear about it in the comments down below fring on the other hand frame looks like it's just a kind of a sketchy thing that it's not done that it's not complete but the calls are made now we can do voice calls really easily a little bit of a delay obviously I'm going void across my cellular data network to her cellular data networking down to her phone and the faster that your network is the faster that that's going to be in most cases this is where latency really comes into play and where t-mobile's got kind of a home run here Sprint's latency is in the hundreds of milliseconds sometimes three and four hundred whereas t-mobile's is just you know about a hundred ninety eighty somewhere in that range but still kind of goofy that they can't get video chat or video calling right and that's really what this phone is advertised to do please prove me wrong you guys have better experiences let me know but showing off what chat can and can't do I'm Joe for pocketnow.com