Summary: For a mobile version of a desktop platform site, you don’t lose much. Quality is top-notch for mobile streaming, even on older devices.
Internet webcam juggernaut MyFreeCams (MFC) has a fully-functional mobile version of their site available, for cam chatting on the go. As more and more people use their smart phones for nearly every activity, that convenience is being embraced by cam companies, too. But how does the mobile experience stack up against the desktop version of the site, and against the competition? That’s what this review is all about.
We just focus on the mobile site and aspects of the mobile site in this review, rather than on the features, systems, models, and costs of the site. For that information, check out our comprehensive review of MyFreeCams.
MFC mobile definitely maintains the same overall aesthetic as the desktop site. Model feeds are prominently features, with most of the other features available through buttons or the main menu. Notably, you can configure a ton of aspects of the mobile home page to your liking, just as you can the desktop site. This includes switching between avatars, previews of the stream, details of the stream, and a text list for each model feed displayed, configuring your search options, exploring tags, and related features.
With just a few taps, you can join a public chat room, purchase tokens, check your PMs or favorite models, and any of the other activities you’d normally do on MFC. Within the chats, you can see the live video feed, the text chat, access the model’s profile, or convert to a low-speed slideshow mode that has no audio but updates at around 2 frames per second. With any chat room open, you can request a private chat or other services via the main menu, so everything is pretty easy to do.
Video quality on mobile is surprisingly good. Models with HD cam feeds show up in HD quality when you choose the live, full-screen video option. Audio is synched well with the video stream, too. The frame rate may not be as crisp or smooth as on the desktop version, but it’s quite high quality overall, especially if you have a reliable cellular connection or are connected via Wi-Fi, and even a decent smart phone. In our testing, even on an older generation iPhone 4S the quality was quite impressive.
If you do have a slower or spottier connection, the aforementioned slideshow mode still lets you get a sense of what’s going on in the cam feed, without disconnects, hiccups, lag, or freezes in the video stream. Like any mobile stream, the HD live feed is more prone to having jitters, lag, brief hiccups or freezes than the desktop version of the site, but handles them fairly gracefully, and is no more noticeable than any other video streaming through a mobile browser.
We tested the mobile site on desktop, iOS, and Android devices. On iOS, the default Safari browser was used, and then Google’s Chrome browser on Android. The site was fast to load, responsive, and easy to use on both operating systems, as well as on desktop and a desktop-based Android emulator.
For a mobile version of a desktop platform site, you don’t lose much. It’s optimized well, so that the transition from the desktop to mobile version is quite natural. It’s easy to use, and you can basically do nearly everything that you can do on the desktop version. While we prefer the larger screens available on traditional desktop/laptop devices for seeing as much of the action as possible, the mobile version of MyFreeCams is a perfectly viable option for watching webcams on the go, in bed, covertly, at work…whatever, we don’t judge!
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