August 13th, 2008
Qik now available for jailbroken iPhone and iPhone 3G devices
Qik is one of the well known mobile live video streaming applications that works particularly well on a device like the Nokia N95. They also have a beta for Windows Mobile Smartphones that I tried on the Blackjack II last month. Qik announced they were working on an iPhone application back in June and today announced that it is working on the iPhone 3G. However, it does require you to jailbreak your phone and install Qik using the Cydia installer as detailed in this Howard Forums post.
I just returned my iPhone 3G so I cannot test it out on the AT&T 3G network, but I do have a jailbroken original iPhone so I installed it and tried streaming via my home WiFi connection. You have to make sure to have your SIM in your iPhone that you used to sign up with the Qik service and then when you launch it the application will recognize that the SMS is in your Inbox and start up. Qik runs a bit slower on the iPhone than the N95 because the iPhone isn’t optimized for video like the N95, but as you can see in this video (also shown below) the sound was quite good and the video wasn’t too bad at all. Hmm, do I have to get an iPhone 3G again?
Be aware that jailbreaking your iPhone does pose some risks and I doubt that too many mainstream people will jailbreak just to stream video content. However, the geeks like me will and we’ll let you know how it does. Hopefully, Qik will someday be able to provide the application in the iPhone App Store for all to use, but since they decided to go this route with the jailbreak method it seems they may not have much faith that Apple will allow this soon.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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