The Magic of FaceTime

I've been a user of FaceTime since I got my hands on the iPhone 4 just days after release. To me it has always been more of a gimmick and not really something that I would use often. However, two events occurred recently that shed a new light on the service.

The first one was a conversation I was having with a flight attendant on a recent flight. She was off duty and happened to notice that I was doing something on my iPhone. She then took out hers and proceeded to tell me all of the things that she loves about her iPhone. The story started out the same way most people's do that randomly talk to me about their phones, except that in her case it centered more around some things that I didn't expect her to talk about. For example, she didn't appear techie but then started telling me how she Skypes with her husband while he's traveling. I asked her for a bit of clarification and she started telling me how she does it from the train from her iPhone while he's in London. Then at night or random times during the day, they both get to a spot with Wi-Fi and enjoy a FaceTime conversation. Needless to say, it was the start of a very geeky conversation. I have since been doing that with my family while traveling.

The second experience happened about an hour ago. My wife was texting me asking how to hook up the Wii for our kids. I had disconnected the power since the light doesn't stop glowing when it's plugged in. Long story short, after a few failed attempts at figuring out the issue, both on the phone and via text, I initiated a call via FaceTime. Moments later she showed me the Wii, which appeared to be powered on, and we realized that it was receiving power (the light was red) but that we had to actually power it on (the light goes green). This is definitely something that would have taken a lot longer than 30 seconds to figure out, had it not been for the ability for me to view what she was seeing.

The above experiences made me think more about what our future will be. When a video conference call will be commonplace, regardless of location, since our networks will support extreme bandwidth. There are obviously cons associated with this constant connectivity, but the pros seem to be quickly outweighing them.

Do you have a FaceTime or other techie experience to share? If so, comment below.