Goodbye Skype - hello, maybe, Facetime?

Cheers

Dave R

I have an iphone but never use facetime. That said, there are plenty of "Facetime for Beginners" videos on YouTube. e.g.

Re buying an iphone: I bought a second-hand superseded model. i.e. When the latest model was the 14, I bought a used 12[1] but it still runs the latest version of iOS and does all (and far more) than I need. On the whole, Apple seem reasonably good about not forcing obsolescence onto earlier models.

If everyone you might talk to uses an iPhone, Facetime would work. But many countries have a favourite app - eg WhatsApp is very popular. You may find your correspondents all use WA because everyone else they know does. That way you aren't that strange person who uses a different app to everyone else.

If you use another app like WhatsApp, an Android phone might be option.

See this table of which iPhone supports which OS:

Once an iPhone has been dropped from the current OS, there can be limited updates for serious security flaws for a couple of years, but others aren't covered.

If you don't care about security an unsupported OS may work, but at some point older devices will stop working. Apple says:

1. With a cellular data plan, you can also use FaceTime without Wi-Fi on any of these devices: iPhone 4s or later, iPad Pro (all models), and iPad (3rd generation or later)."

which is quite a long way. There were rumours they would drop some older models in 2023, but it seems they didn't.

(WhatsApp won't work on older than iOS 15, which is a much newer cutoff)

Another option for Facetime would be a Mac or an iPad, if those are more useful for you.

Theo

Teletext news reports that MS offers "Teams" (WTMB) as a substitute.

Facetime is excellent (we use it several times a week with relatives in the USA), but it is only available, as I understand it, on Apple equipment (whether iPhone, iPad or something like a MacBook).

There's always FaceBook Messenger of course, for audio or video.

FaceTime on Windows?

I didn't know that.

I think s/h iPads tend to be cheaper still.

Spent far too long tonight trying to get a Teams business account to speak with a personal Skype account ... they'd do text chat ok, but no voice calling, and if one invited the other to a meeting, the other couldn't allow them entry from the lobby ... gave up and used Zoom.

I won't touch WhatsApp or FB Messenger with a bargepole.

The other person is the only person I know who ought to be willing/capable of using Signal, so we'll try that tomorrow ... beats paying £1.50/min to call him from O2 ...

The reason it's designed that way, is for authentication.

If you want elegant, that would be two tomato tins and a piece of cotton string.

Really, nothing has changed. The last time there was an earthquake, people were wandering around with "how, oh how, can I make a voice call". What follows, reminds me a lot of the last time I wrote one of these up. Deja Vu all over again, to quote a famous baseball player.

If you have the time to spend, you can apply your decoder ring to articles like this, to see if you can carve a solution out of it.

The first sign of good software, is when it has a status like that.

I hope that has a user manual :-)

Paul

The kicker is there is some sort of monthly fee, as well as a PAYG fee. And that's what this transition is really about, is rent-seeking.

Paul

Pretty sure it can be free, provided you only want to chat/talk/vidcall to other teams users, it costs if you want to call actual landline or mobile phones.

If you install WhatsApp on a phone you can link the windows desktop client to it. It then gives one to one and one to many(i.e. group) messaging, that will happily let you paste photos and video etc. It will also do real time audio and video calls. Generally cross platform. Alas owned by Meta these days, but they don't appear to have infected it with ads etc so far.

Teams I find to be rather cumbersome and difficult to use at times - not to mention the confusion from several different versions - some paid, some free with different limitations etc.

Zoom is easier the teams IME.

Nick Odell snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

A bit niche but there's always Telegram, free, secure, private, available for phone or desktop and supports video calling:

Isnt that run by Russia? Or is that tik-tok?

I didn't know that before: thank you.

It might be useful to set that up on a Windows machine anyway but I think the main downside is that it seems you can't initiate calls from outside the Appleosphere.

Nick

Ta for that. I think the latest version is 16 but your 12 is still running along okay, yes?

Nick

I'm not really a tablet kindova guy. But thanks anyway.

Nick

That might be fun to try but, like the "Teams" thing, none of my regular contacts use it AFAIK and my aim is to try and move from Skype to something the others already use.

Nick

To John and Andy:

Mark Zuckerberg and I had a big falling out in 2016 (okay so Zuckerberg won't have even noticed, but I did.) So I won't be using Meta products anytime soon. But thanks for mentioning them anyway.

Nick

Apart from what Paul has said about Teams subscriptions etc, I don't think anybody I know uses it so everybody else would have to switch too.

Being assimilated into the Zuckersphere is a non-negotiable no-no, thanks.

Nick