When I purchased the T-Mobile myTouch 4G, it was partly because I was very intrigued with the option of video calling.  Heading out on business trips and calling home to speak to the family to say good night to my girls sounded much easier and much more fun if we could do it as a family video call.  The reality so far has not been too great.

The myTouch 4G comes with a T-Mobile customized version of QIK, just like the Sprint EVO 4G and the Sprint Samsung EPIC 4G have before it.  Other phones like the iPhone 4 have also headed in the same direction as video technology evolves into something that could become the norm for making your calls.

There are problems with the technology, and these problems are not just related to the software itself, although that is a big part of the issue.  Other issues involve the performance of the network you are connected to.  We all know that the major players are slowly upgrading to supply mega bandwidth to our devices; it is still fairly patchy, but that’s another story.  Of course, you can always connect to WiFi when it’s available.

The software itself doesn’t seem ready to provide the performance we expected.  The initial release of QIK on the T-Mobile myTouch 4G didn’t really work out of the box, but they soon released an update to fix some of the issues.  The update is better, but my personal experience has not been great.  Originally, making a video call ended with the connection dropping before you had a chance to talk, but the latest update appeared to almost fixed this issue.  I say almost as it still occasionally just drops the call for no apparent reason.

So what is the problem now you may ask!

First of all, there appears to be a contact synchronization issue.  All my contacts are synchronized successfully into the QIK contact list, but all the contacts I have, which I know are video capable contacts, are not showing as video capable in the QIK contact list.  I have my wife’s phone configured with QIK, the same way as mine is (she has the myTouch 4G too) and no matter how I try to alter her contact detals in my GMail account, she always appears as not being video capable.  When I click on her contact in QIK I receive the following message:

This is very frustrating as I purchased the phone partly because it had a front facing camera and was video call capable.

I have been speaking to QIK, but the replies have been fairly slow and little progress has been made.  I’m sure they’ll get it fixed, but it’s a little disappointing that this functionality was obviously not tested very well before the release of the phone.  Let’s hope T-Mobile and QIK get their act together and release another update soon.

There is another video calling applications on the phone in the form of Yahoo Messenger and the updated video calling feature.  The better aspect of the Yahoo Messenger approach is, it works with any video capable yahoo messenger client, including your desktop computer.

Again, the reality has not been so great.  We managed to get video calling connected but there was a grating sound in the background that we could not resolve.  I’m pretty sure the sound is feedback from the phones microphone picking up sound from it’s own speaker, but I’ll have to confirm this.

Connecting with the desktop client on my computer seemed to work much better, albeit with some slight video issues related to the sizing of the video overlay, as you can see in the image below.  The image on the left is the Yahoo Messenger client running on windows 7 and on the right is the Yahoo Messenger client on the myTouch in a the video call.  The outlined box in the lower right of this image does show my own preview on the phone’s screen, but the DDMS screen capture does not capture the video overlay from the screen.  Apart from this, the sounds was loud and clear and worked just fine.

There are other video chat programs available on the Android Market such as Tango and I will be giving them a run for their money over the coming weeks so stay tuned for updates.  As we receive updates from T-Mobile, QIK and Yahoo I’ll test them out and let you know how they are.

The other software to mention is GChat as Google have said they are working on adding video chat functionality that should be released in Gingerbread.  Googles approach will use the standard network protocols your current GChat programs use today.  For obvious reasons, that would be the best way to go as most Android devices you purchase today already have the GChat client installed.

What video chat programs have you tried and how did they work for you?