On 08/04/2014 01:36 AM Bret Busby wrote:
How many different people do you want to be able to video chat with? >What's your purpose? Figure out what you want to do, and you probably >don't need skype at all. >Relatives and acquaintances (for me), would be good, and, some people of whom I have no knowledge. I have immediate family members in a couple of countries, that I might not even recognise, now, not having seen them for a while, and, distant relatives (I have been into genealogical research), in various countries around the world.
For a long time I waited for OpenMoko to integrate a camera into their phone, but finally gave up and got a Samsung running Android. I use skype w/ video on it oftentimes to show people around my house (e.g., a couple Buddhist monks from Bhutan who'd never been outside their own country). I also used it with a car mechanic friend when I wanted to show him part of my car's engine I was working on and needed his help with. I also found skype video handy when talking with a friend in another language and I didn't know the translation for an object I was talking about... I just pointed the camera at it.
There are a lot of reasons to have and use video when phoning with someone, watching each other's faces while talking being, for me, the least of them.