Dell announced today that they are including the SightSpeed communications application on new Dell Studio laptops. The press release for Dell Video Chat starts off by saying how easy it is to use. Now one of my key measures of whether a product is REALLY easy to setup and use — or whether they are just full of puff and marketing hype is whether I can have my Mom set it up without any help. So I thought - If this thing is so easy to use - let me send my Mom a link with this message. So that’s what I did.

Mom -

Download this and let’s try it — my user name is “mas90guru” - you’ll need the “MAC” version

Link:
http://www.sightspeed.com/dellvideochat/downloadquicksteps

How did my Mom do with just that brief email and a link to the Dell Video Chat download? Keep reading..

About 15 minutes later when I came back to the computer I had a message:

And as I sat down I was rather shocked to find that …. she wasn’t kidding.

There was my mom in her pajamas. She’d actually sent a full video email on her own.

(I only wish I were kidding) — here’s the video mail that she sent.

My Mom had installed Dell Video Chat, found my user name, sent a video email and initiated a video chat.

ALL WITHOUT A TECH SUPPORT CALL .. to me!

Phase one of the “mom test” passed with flying colors.

Now I just had to tell her that she better put some clothes on because she was the model for the screen captures that I needed for this review.

We had a very good chat for at least 15 minutes. There was no echo or audio feedback whatsoever and the camera quality was about the best I’ve seen in a video chat. We both have iMac computers - so the fact that the iMac has video and audio capabilities built in may have helped the quality.

There was no stop and start of the video and the audio was even throughout.

Dell Video Chat supports one on one video conferencing for free. If you want to add multiple parties to your chat (up to an unlimited number) you can pay $9.95 per month or $99 per year. Paying the fee also gets you some additional features such as longer video email (maximum of 3 minutes for paying subscribers versus 30 seconds for non-payers).

Using Dell Video Chat was so easy that I was soon able to convince my sister in Virginia to try it as well (all without any technical assistance from me!).

If you’d rather send a recorded message via email, Dell Video Chat supports messages of up to 30 seconds in length if you have a free account and 3 minutes for paid accounts. When the video is sent the recipient gets just a link to your video. So there is no bulky file attachment to worry about clogging up their inbox.

After you record the message in the Dell Video Chat client, you can add a brief text introduction and then email it. This is handy if you want to communicate via video but the other person doesn’t have a web camera or is camera shy.

You can use the Dell Video Chat service to place calls from your computer to regular phone lines via the Internet. This is strictly a pay service (You buy credits in an initial $10 block).

Here’s the rate screen that you use to determine how much it costs to call a certain number.

Parents can setup a password to establish parental controls so the kids can’t contact people who you don’t know.

We had a lot of fun testing this service. It was very easy to setup (my mom set it up and had the whole video service streaming in under 15 minutes with not a single question).

The quality was excellent. Setup was a breeze. This will make an excellent everyday video web chat. It’s so easy that if you’re not interested in regular online chats that you could use the service for special family get togethers to join distant members of your family by video.

Link: Dell Video Chat
Link: Sample video email