KEY POINTS:
I was dying to see whether I'd have the same reaction as the woman on the Telecom advert - get all weepy and emotional when I used my Ojo for the first time.
Strangely enough, I didn't. After all, I only knew three other people with Ojo video
phones - my father, who eventually unplugged his because it was eating up too much of his monthly broadband cap, the office workers at Telecom, who would swivel around in their chairs and look at me curiously when I dialled their number, and some other guy in Wellington I didn't like the look of.
No, videoconferencing wasn't proving to be the tear-jerking experience I expected.
In fact, I began to dread the digital ring of the Ojo. The phone, which Telecom recently put on sale for, ahem, $750 each or $1400 a pair plus US$15 a month in connection charges, has a seven inch screen that gives you a surprisingly good picture of the other caller - and the room behind.
Suddenly you have you start thinking about what sort of image you present when you answer the phone - and make sure the place is tidy. So Ojo wasn't for me.
However, the technology underpinning it is very good. I was surprised at how easy it is to set up, the closest I've come to the often promised and seldom delivered "plug and play" configuration. You simply plug the Ojo into the Ethernet port on your broadband router and connect the power cable and you're away.
The black, Dalek-esque phone stand is dominated by the large screen and a physical keypad you can use for punching in numbers.
The Ojo's menu is simple to navigate and has good functions - you can set up a video mail greeting if you're away when someone calls, store quick dial numbers and tweak the display settings. If you don't want anyone to see you, you can blank out the screen and just talk. That would seem to be missing the point.
The Ojo would be a failure but for its handling of video compression. We've all tried video conferencing with web cameras, where the picture colour and clarity is poor, the video stuttering and audio bad.
The Ojo is miles better, as long as you've a relatively good broadband connection. It uses the mpeg4 video coding standard, which allows it to efficiently convert your image to digital video and send it across telecom's network to the other Ojo-er in real-time.
I managed to have several flawless Ojo sessions while surfing the web at the same time.
As my father found out when he got his ihug bill for the month, the Ojo contributes to the data your internet connection uses, and being full-motion video, it will start to chew through the data, should you spend large amounts of time on the phone. You'll want to have a reasonable data cap on your internet plan.
The technology is good, but the practicalities of the Ojo aren't so good. You can only talk to other Ojo owners so they all have to invest in the phones and the monthly subscription to talk to you.
You're unlikely, then, to develop a large network of Ojo callers, unless Telecom starts selling the phones for much less. The monthly subscription seems steep, though if you're constantly calling one other contact, and need to see them, it's ideal. You only pay the monthly fee - no additional charges, whether you're calling nationally or internationally.
The Ojo is sold in the US, Britain and Australia, so if you have family overseas or your company an offshore branch office, the Ojo is a relatively cheap way to video-conference on a one-to-one basis.
Web conferencing through the likes of MSN Messenger and Skype is free and is getting better as more people move to broadband.
But the future of mass market video conferencing may well lie in the video games consoles in homes. The recently launched PS3 and the Xbox 360 both support video conferencing through cheap camera attachments.
Flat-screen TVs will be ideal for video conferencing, which will likely become a must-have for any console owner.
Ojo will serve a good niche, but as our online contact lists grow, we'll need a robust technology that puts more people in the picture.
