There’s a lot to criticize about the new video calling service from Apple, FaceTime – that it isn’t interoperable at the moment, that it works only over WiFi, that you must have an iPhone 4 to be able to use the service, and so on. But there is something that FaceTime does for Apple that all the rest of its innovations in the latest release don’t: it separates it from the pack of Android devices. Think back on Apple’s previous
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 19th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
The new iPhone 4 was just announced. It’s not 4G or HD – just 4. I have to give it to Steve this time – not calling it 4G means he isn’t jumping the LTE wagon just yet. And not calling it HD means he really knows what HD is, and while the display of the new iPhone is impressive, HD it ain’t. The worst part of it all? It has a front facing camera. And as someone who predicted
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 9th, 2010 | Filed under Clients
I’m a huge fan of Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen techniques for better design and delivery of presentations. This is why the moment Sagee mentioned the words “effective slide style” and “via video conference” in the same sentence (tweet, actually…), I had no option but to sit down and write this post. IF I wanted to make this post short, I’d simply send you to read Garr’s book, which is accidentally also called Presentation Zen. But I am not that kind
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 20th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
[This is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] There are a few more issues I’d like to tackle in this series of posts, and some of these issues have more of a general nature to them. This time I’m looking into the future. If you are about to develop an HD video terminal, then you are going to invest a considerable amount of thought and time in your hardware. It also
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 24th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
[We're still in the cameras part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] [This time, I've asked Fabrizio Ghetti, Video System Engineer in our Italian R&D center, to provide a short list of requirements to look for when shopping around for endpoint cameras.] When you go out to shop for a camera for your hardware endpoint design, you will be looking at a lot of brochures showing different specifications. Even if
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By guest | March 3rd, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] Time to talk about OSD. That is the On Screen Display (OSD). This is what users will see besides the actual video streams, the Graphical User Interface (GUI), so there’s a lot of reasons to spend some time around it. It is also something that causes a lot of headaches for hardware designers, especially in the seamless, iPhone-inspired era of interfaces we live
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 18th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] In my last post, I discussed the different layouts that are required by a video endpoint, focusing mainly on the basics – single video source, single display. This leaves a lot to be desired, both on consumer videophones and on enterprise video phones. I’d like to address this post what happens when you want to go to the enterprise market with a
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 7th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] This is the first real post in this series, so I’d like to start off with the reason for writing this series. We’ve set out here to create a product to assist customers with developing a high definition video client – our BEEHD. The main “theme” behind this product is to reduce the hassles involved with dealing with standards and video coding
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 26th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
