Only fitting that there is more Playbook posts this week, as one new features are finally coming out for the Playbook and two, this is the week of the Blackberry World conference. So today I happened to check out the Video Chat app for the Playbook. You call users by using the Blackberry ID, hence the new soon to be hear phrase “What’s your BBID?”
My call was made all the way to Espoo, Finland from New York, and I was say the video and voice quality was very good. The video chat app works over WiFi, but later on I’m going to see how quality might be if I use the hotspot for phone to work around that and do a chat over “4G”. As I mention quality of the video was very good, and there seem to be no lag time. You can use both camera on the Playbook, so you can show someone in chat what you are looking at as well.
The gentleman I chatted with was Yousif (@yousifabdullah) and it was a very good experience. One thing to note is that, until FaceTime, the Video chat app won’t rotate if you turn your Playbook, nothing major but thought it should be mentioned. One final item I will mention, is that you don’t have to be inside the app to receive calls. When I was called, I received a notification from the device message area letting me know I had a call, I thought this was very cool.
To wrap, if you have a Playbook you need only update to the latest OS for it to get the new Video chat app. It works over WiFi (and hopefully via Mobile HotSpot), and you can make both video and voice only calls via the app.
Screenshot was taken directly from the Playbook, like how the Playbook let’s you take screenshots!
