What started out as an iPhone 4 exclusive is now migrating over to the Mac. Steve Jobs announced earlier today that Facetime will now be available as a standalone app for the Mac, enabling anyone running Snow Leopard to video chat with iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G owners.
Facetime is currently available as a beta download from Apple, though it’s interesting that Apple didn’t decide to integrate Facetime into iChat.
Apple’s press release reads:
FaceTime makes video calling to or from mobile devices easy for the first time,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve sold more than 19 million FaceTime-ready iPhone 4 and iPod touch devices in the past four months, and now those users can make FaceTime calls with tens of millions of Mac users.”
FaceTime for Mac requires Mac OS® X Snow Leopard® and is easy to set up with an Apple ID. The public beta is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/mac/facetime.
October 21st, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Finally, this is a big step towards legitimizing FaceTime as a standard of communication.
If they make a Windows client, this could be huge for the standard.