WhatsApp has announced the mass rollout of its video calling
feature, which had been in beta testing since August. With this move, WhatsApp
has brought encrypted video calling facility to over 1 billion of its users
worldwide, enabling them to make face-to-face calls despite the distances
between them.
Video calling is taking over the world of text messaging day
by day. Ever since network carriers increased the network connectivity areas
and internet bandwidth, everyone is shifting form text messaging to video
calling instead. For that reason WhatsApp has just rolled a new update that
includes the long expected video calling feature. Tech experts are seeing the
addition of this feature as a direct shot towards Apple’s FaceTime and Skype.
Skype was the first major player in this space, while
FaceTime comes pre-installed on millions of Apple devices across the world,
giving it a huge user base as well. Each of these apps offers secure video
calls and smooth interface, and claims to offer good user experience.
The reason that the company has taken almost a year to test
the feature is because of the massive user base of the multimedia messaging
platform spread across multiple operating systems and architectures. The
company does not want any service interruption or severe bug for all the users
that are using the service. After months of leaks at screenshots and feature
reports from the closed beta testers, the company launched the feature has a
hidden feature in Android WhatsApp beta. The company seems to have stepped on
the gas regarding introducing new features alongside working on new features in
last one year.
However, unless you are on Wi-Fi, using Skype, WhatsApp
video calls, or FaceTime can be an expensive affair, considering the data
consumed and associated charges. A comparison made on the data consumed by
WhatsApp, Skype, and Apple’s FaceTime in video calls to find out which uses the
least amount was very instructive.
Apple’s FaceTime used the least amount of data in a test,
eating up 8.8MB of data in a 4-minute call while Skype and WhatsApp consumed an
average of 12.3MB and 12.74MB of mobile data during video calls. All calls were
made on Vodafone 3G network in Delhi-NCR telecom circle. The amount of data
consumed was calculated as an average of 3 calls made using each app.
In a separate control test carried out by TBR® Africa in
Lagos – Nigeria, it was also observed that video call quality on WhatsApp was
very unsatisfactory while using a 3G mobile network. Though Skype was not so great
either, but the choppy video was more pronounced in the former. In the
Delhi-NCR telecom test for FaceTime, the video call quality was decent till the
other person switched to mobile data as well, after which the video became
severely pixelated and lagged considerably.
So, FaceTime used less data despite the call quality being better or comparable.
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