Live streaming video from a S60 handset is something that only Ewan (on the AAS team) has any real world experience of - so we set him to compare the latest versions from the two main contenders, head to head. Qik vs Flixwagon. Ewan helpfully provides a couple of live-ish example videos too, so that you get the idea.
Read on in the full article.
With all due respect to Flixwagon, its Qik for me all the way. Its probably the interface you get used to.
But what a review! its so good. He leaves it for you to judge!
Ashu,
if you read carefully you'll see that I do come down on the side of Qik, but I'm very concious that the factors that led me to make my decision , specifically the ability to save your own videos to your hard drive and the number of external service supported, are not those that would factor highly in the majority of people using these services. When you have two services that are almost identical, it's very hard to call a winner. Qik shades it for me, but for others it will be Flixwagon.
Your case, it's the interface and familiarity, and thats a very personal thing.
It would be nice to include http://bambuser.com in the article...it supports s60 v3, but also UIQ3...and it works very well
the request to include kyte was clearly justified, as it *is* S60 (i have V.4.9.5 beta on my N95), and in many ways superior to both other contenders. also, to be able to live stream, but also upload pre-recorded vids from the phone with even higher quality to the same destination applet is a big plus IMO. check it out! (i have no relations to kyte)
Following Kyte's own installation recommendations, it provides v 3.55 of their mobile client, which is definitly Java-based. If there's a beta of a native C++ client, I can certainly look at it when it reaches a release candidate.
One critical aspect of the evaluation absent from Ewan's report is the quality of customer support. While Ewan is a savvy user, he may be in less need of support, but for others this is a critical factor.
Qik activity monitors their site, Twitter and blogs for reports of problems with usage of the service. More than once I've seen executives in the company reach out to users to identify problems, answer questions or help in with erroneous system performance. I've never seen such behavior from Flixwagon.
To take this a step further, the primary reason I switched from Flixwagon to Qik is the quality of the people in the two companies. Flixwagon's US executive has issues with voracity. And the Qik team is mostly top drawer other than one weakness their marketing staff who seems mostly clicky.
Anyway, the point is that support for a service is a very key bit when delivering a complete review.