Video Calling

I have my video calls, now where's that flying car? Photo by Vincent® via Flickr

As kids, my friend Jeff and I spent our weekend afternoons at Fry’s Electronics looking at gadgets. One of the few gadgets that still sticks in my mind after almost 20 years is a special telephone that could take a low resolution photo and send it over a phone line to someone else with the same phone. At the time, that seemed both pretty cool and fairly useless because we didn’t know anyone with one of those phones. And it wasn’t quite what we wanted, which was video calling like in The Jetsons.

During the first half of those 20 years, I didn’t see much progress towards that video calling dream. Eventually, I got a taste of my dream while doing video conferences at past employers, but those setups were much too expensive to buy for personal use. Finally though, video calling became possible a few years ago using a computer, a webcam and an application like Skype or iChat. I’ve used those applications over the years and while they have been fun to use, the resolution hasn’t always been great and you can’t call someone without a computer, like my grandparents.

Probably for people like my grandparents who don’t want a computer, Skype eventually teamed up with ASUS to make a stand alone video phone. Of course, a broadband connection will still be needed to make it work, but that’s to be expected. My hangup with the device is the 7 inch screen. That’s much too small for people with poor eyesight and much too small to compare with the large video screen calling I had dreamed of as a kid. (more…)