Face to Face

Facetime goes big-time

For those of you lucky enough to have a iPhone 4 (such as my wife who received her’s today), you will notice that it has a new video chat feature called Facetime built into it. Great for keeping in touch with friends and relatives when you’re away. But, one thing that was announced at Apple’s recent press event was that Facetime was also released for the Mac. That means that you can talk to somebody’s iPhone 4 with your Mac, but also, more interestingly it means that you can talk from one Mac to another Mac using only Facetime.

In my experience, it is extremely fast (faster than iChat or Skype) and the really cool feature is you don’t even have to have it running on your Mac to receive calls. Check out Apple’s Facetime page for details, and note you will have to have Snow Leopard running on your Mac to reap the benefits.