Qik for the iPhone

At MobileCamp Vancouver this past weekend, I thought it might be fun to try out Qik.com‘s iPhone app. It’s currently only available for use on jailbroken iPhones (via Cydia).

While David was talking about some iPhone tricks, I streamed him live via wifi to Qik and we had it on the projector in the room. There was only a minor lag in what I was shooting realtime and what was coming back on the screen. I was also impressed by the amount of audio that was picked up by the iPhone’s onboard mic (considering it was inside a rubber case):

While this video example is not ideal, it should give you an idea of the usefulness of a streaming video application on the iPhone…especially with the availability of 3G network speeds and a healthy data plan. I was using a jailbroken 1st gen iPhone to shoot this video and haven’t yet tried it on a 3G iPhone since I haven’t jailbroken mine (yet).

It’s worth noting that Apple doesn’t currently allow developers to create video streaming apps but it’s something that has been available on other platforms for awhile now. Just check out Roland’s adventures in live streaming from Nokia-land.

Qik also isn’t the only way to record video on your iPhone either but it’s the only one I’ve tried that does live streaming.