Price: Free
Gotta-Have-It Factor: 1
I need to preface this review by noting that Knocking Live is currently in Beta (hence the "Beta" in the title). This review may change once the final version is released. That being said, Knocking Live is not ready for mainstream use, in my opinion.
The one advantage to Knocking Live is that it is a closs-platform video chat application. So those of you Android users out there who have friends with an iPhone (i.e. every Android user out there), can supposedly use Knocking Live to videochat with your iPhone friends (to give you a better view of their sense of superiority).
Unfortunately, after testing Knocking Live with one friend who owns an iPhone 4, and one friend with a Nexus One, I was unable to get Knocking Live to work (I own a Motorola Droid, if you were wondering).
The biggest problem we had was the force closes, which came frequently. We didn't get more than 5 seconds of video feed without the app force closing. Another problem was that we couldn't get the audio to work. So it ended up being a laggy, silent video feed. And the last problem is that only one video stream seemed to work at a time. If I could see my friend on my phone, he couldn't see me on my phone, and vice versa.
Another frustration I had with Knocking Live is that your friends have to be "Online" for you to be able to "knock" on their door. For me, this meant I had to have the application open and in the foreground. So in order to videochat with your friends, you'd have to contact them via other means first, tell them to open up Knocking Live, and then "knock" on their door. Hopefully they'll come up with a way to notify your friends that you want to chat with them, without always having Knocking Live open and running.
Fortunately, Knocking Live is free in the Android Market because I wouldn't recommend paying anything for this app. So I'll wait and see if Knocking Live improves at all with future updates. But for now, I'd search elsewhere if you're looking for a cross-platform video chat application. I give it a 1 on the gotta-have-it scale.
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