

IPhone 4 FaceTime without Wifi - jordanmessina
http://blog.deviceknit.com/post/739345775/facetime-without-wifi

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ghshephard
Alternate (that works) is drop your data plan from $25 2 Gbytes to $15 / 250
Megabytes, and go buy a $60/Month Sprint MiFi/5 Gigabytes (Wireless HotSpot).

Total Net Cost is $35/month above what the iPhone normally costs. $60 (Sprint)
- $10 (Data Plan Savings) - $15 (Tethering Cost)

The net costs are less if you have an iPad AND an iPhone, as you don't have to
purchase a 3G iPad or a Data plan for it.

Advantages:

    
    
      o Data Limit is 5 Gigabytes instead of 2.
      o iPhone, iPad, Laptops all can (simultaneously) use it.
      o You now have Sprint and AT&T Data Coverage.
      o All of the "WiFi only" rules work on the MiFi
        (Facetime, AppStore download Limit)

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jrockway
And you get unlimited 4G. (With the download rates I get, I calculated it as
about 1.3TB per month. Much more generous than AT&T's 250MB.)

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russell_h
If you have a tethered laptop why not just use the webcam that most laptops
have shipped with for years now?

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sjs
Because you can't use Facetime with your notebook's webcam.

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desigooner
If anybody has tried the 1-888-FACETIME line to test out facetime, it seems
that the apple reps are using a webcam instead ... they talk as per the script
about switching to the iphone etc. but for some reason, it seemed like they
were not using iPhones (image quality, orientation, etc.) ... Apple probably
coded some internal tool to mimic facetime .. i tried this call twice and i
got the same impression both times

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bmalicoat
The functionality is no doubt coming to iChat, maybe they have special build
they are using to do it now.

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siglesias
Cool, but I'll just say it. Impractical.

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jordanmessina
It may be more convenient for the other party, if they don't have Skype or
don't have a computer but there's a hotspot to use FaceTime. It's a good
alternative and if it's this easy for the party w/ a computer than it might be
the more practical option if you want to video chat.

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alex1
The ironic thing is that you could also use FaceTime while walking on the
street if you're walking with a friend that has an Android phone with the
ability to make his phone a WiFi hot spot.

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jordanmessina
Yup! This capability is built into 2.2 and if you're still on 2.1 and your
phone is rooted there are great apps like Barnacle which is completely free
(there is also a paid version for donation purposes).

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kylec
A while back I had to do something similar to download a podcast. The iPhone
doesn't let you download apps or iTunes media (including podcasts) that are
over 10MB in size over the cellular network. So I tethered to my MacBook,
downloaded in iTunes, and synced the podcast back to the device.

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gohnjanotis
I've run into that 10MB problem, too! I think I remember Apple's threshold was
100MB originally, and the 10MB one is just absurd. These solutions seem a
little bulky, but the tethering is to the point it's pretty seamless. I just
wish an iPhone 4 jailbreak would come out so I could go back to MyWi instead
of paying AT&T an extra $15/mo.

~~~
sjs
It was increased to 20MB near the end of 2009.

Devs can get around this by downloading extra bits on first startup or heavily
compressing big datasets and decompressing them on first startup. Only a
handful do, but there are ways around it. It would be nice if it was just a
warning instead of a strict rule.

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dedward
So it's.... how to use facetime without wifi by creating a wifi hotspot with
your laptop? How is that not using wifi?

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jrockway
Apple products sure are easy to use.

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martythemaniak
If Apple opened up the protocol tomorrow, there'd be a better (3G)
implementation on Android fairly sson.

