iPhone 5 For Dummies, 6th Edition

Seeing Is Believing with FaceTime

FaceTime video reminds us of a favorite line from The Who’s rock opera Tommy: “See me, feel me, touch me.” The “see me” (and for that matter, “see you”) part arrives with FaceTime. Think of all the people who will want to see you, such as an old college roommate living halfway around the world, grandparents living miles away (okay, they really want to see your newborn), or an old flame in a distant location.

Fortunately, using FaceTime is as easy as making a regular call on the iPhone. Plus, FaceTime comes with at least two major benefits besides the video:

FaceTime calls don’t count against your regular minutes, though they will count against your data plan allotment if you make these calls over a cellular connection (a new feature in iOS 6).

The audio quality on FaceTime calls, those over Wi-Fi anyway, is superior to a regular cell phone connection.

But FaceTime also has a couple of major caveats:

Both you and the party you’re talking to must have an iPhone 4, 4S, or 5, an iPad 2 or later model, a Mac computer, or a recent iPod touch. (Okay, so maybe that’s not much of a caveat after all — the list of compatible devices keeps growing.) Apple is ...