By all accounts, however, WhatsApp is a jolly useful general-purpose communication app, including easy video calling. Now hitherto I haven't been keen on the notion of video calling. But months may go by without seeing my friends, and what is still there of my extended family, and I've changed my attitude. So yesterday I downloaded Google's Hangouts app, which south-coast friends Emma and Steph use. I sent a message to Emma, informing her that I'd relented and had the Hangouts app installed on my phone, and had got the Google Chrome extension for Hangouts added for my laptop. She immediately suggested a try-out video conversation on our phones.
Well, it was dead easy to do, and not at all embarrassing or flustering for me. I took a screen shot of Emma, as she appeared on Tigerlily's screen, and you can see a little window bottom-right with me in it, which is what she was seeing on her phone.
Both of us were captured in mid-expression by the screenshot, and look awful, but the 4G-powered resolution is pretty good.
We spoke for several minutes, then closed the call.
What do I think? Well, it was no substitute for an actual face-to-face discussion, but (for me) much nicer than an ordinary telephone call. If this is to be the only way to see distant friends during the next few months, then it will be a lot better than nothing. And I've overcome my bashfulness at the very thought of using video in this way.
As an encore, I next installed Skype on my phone and laptop. So two extra strings to my personal communication bow now!
It doesn't end there. Nancy, the lady who does the local pilates classes, emailed me today to tell me about remote classes she is doing three times a week using Zoom. I'll have to look into that. I'd like to keep my pilates going through the spring and summer, and stay supple and bendy. I already pay her by phone, using the UK banks' method called PayM, so if Zoom checks out OK and I join in on my lounge carpet, there will be no snags about getting the £5 she asks for to her.
A lady queuing with me today (at two metres distance, of course) remarked that our modern technology will be the saving of us, because it's so easy to keep in touch in all kinds of ways. There is much truth in that. I hope that after the present crisis is over, the luddites and fuddy-duddies who have hitherto pleaded that 'all this technology' is 'not for them' will have a change of attitude and get up to speed. It may all have been geeky once, but it isn't any longer. In fact, anyone who is mentally capable of learning the basics, but is too lazy or too prejudiced to get on with it, is putting themselves at a serious disadvantage - and cutting themselves off from society at large - by not getting a smartphone and reading one of the many set-up guides online. TechRadar is a great place for How-To articles.
Age doesn't matter. I always point to my Dad, who as long ago as 2007 (when I went off to New Zealand for two months), and at the age of 86, got himself a Dell desktop PC and fathomed out how to write and send emails, and order groceries online from Tesco. So there.
