In an apparent bid to take on Apple’s newly introduced FaceTime video calling feature, Sunnyvale based Yahoo is said to be working on an Yahoo Messenger application for the iOS and Android platforms that will incorporate a video calling feature. This announcement was made by Yahoo’s Vice President of Mobile Development, David Katz recently.
According to Katz, the new feature shall be much more comprehensive than FaceTime. Firstly, Yahoo Messenger already enjoys a more robust user base with more than 81 million worldwide users. Also, by introducing this functionality to iOS and Android platforms, Yahoo could render the service on a far more number of handsets than Apple has since FaceTime is only available on iPhone 4 and iPod Touch at present. Besides this, the video calling functionality is expected to work on 3G as well as Wi-Fi. FaceTime as you know, famously works only over Wi-Fi.
Yahoo will not have it easy though. There are already a number of other VoIP calling applications with video calling feature that have a more elaborate presence on the smartphone platforms. Yahoo, for all its 81 million user base, is still a predominantly a desktop application that is still to see widespread usage on the mobile. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.