iChatr review

Your iPhone 4 has a front facing camera that gives you the ability to do video chat with anyone. iChatr is a free app for your iPhone 4 that takes advantage of this to initiate random video and voice chat between you and another random person who is currently running the iChatr app. If this sounds familiar, it is. Chatroulette is the notorious web chatting service that iChatr mimics to on the iPhone 4, and without the need for Flash.

Using the app is nothing short of simple and brainless. You just start iChatr while you’re on WiFi. You iPhone 4’s front facing camera is turned on, you see your mug shot on half of the iPhone screen, and instantly see someone else’s cam shot on the other half of the screen. There is no warning or warmups, so get ready to go live to the world, whatever you’re doing and wherever you are.

You can hear other people and speak back to them as well in iChatr if you use your official iPhone 4 headset while you use the app. If you don’t like your random chatter, swipe the screen to see someone else. This seems to be the trend on iChatr unfortunately too. Testing this app, I was online for about 30 seconds and on average, every 2-4 seconds the user got changed out. I’m sure people somewhere are actually having a real “chat” but I didn’t run across anyone who actually wanted to talk, or that I wanted to talk to. There are already lots of videos on YouTube about iChatr and fun things people are finding to do with it, like funny pranks, wearing scary costumes and other oddities.

Overall this is a first of its kind app, that will give iPhone 4 users something to do with their device. It’s free so there are tons of users adopting it. Only time will tell how iChatr evolves. The app has no settings at this point. It would be good if there was a way to setup a profile and find people who you might actually want to chat with with some common interests. If you’re an iPhone 4 owner and brave enough, give it a shot. It’s nothing serious, but it is quite the experience. It’s like FaceTime without rules.

Here is a video demo of the iChatr app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of iChatr was written by Joe Seifi on July 11th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Chat, Featured, Social. Page viewed 10297 times, 4 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.