Downloaded it, installed. Fairly clean, if spartan. It's pretty bereft of features and what it does have is decidedly un-lush compared to other Apple apps. Strikes me as an early beta. It's just not elegant or graceful yet. I expect it will get a lot of work now.
Tried it today and it did work quite nicely, although I don't think FaceTime works with 3G yet - both people I tried it with were in a WiFi zone. Clean video, pretty cool actually - in fact, cooler than I thought it would be. But there are a few pretty big issues:
- You can't shut the camera off. It would be nice to have the camera in a ready, but paused or quiescent state rather than on all the time. Makes me want to turn FT off, in which case I'd not get calls. So I executed a highly technical workaround. I folded a piece of paper and draped it over the aperture. Works like a champ.
- You can only add names from the Apple contacts program. That's OK for me, but it doesn't work that well yet. No list management, clunky addition of people to favorites - definitely early beta. I don't think Steveo has had his way with dev team on this yet.
- There is apparently was a security flaw in that you could view account details in plain text - that's been stubbed out for now I believe. On mine I cannot view account details at all, much less change them. Early beta.
There are a couple hints at niceties. Since you can dial by email or telephone number (and you register a computer by email name) then it's obvious that I'll use this one place to call either phones or other computers. Or presumably iPads at some point, which is really the cat's meow. But I wonder how they'll handle me in more than one place. I leave my Mac Pro on all the time - how will I tell (the service) that (my email address) is now to be called on a pad or notebook rather than my desktop? Enquiring minds want to know.
Although rather raw, I am considerably more tantalized at the possibilities than I thought I would be. I think they may be on to something here.
