Stay in touch using your Chrome OS notebook.
Did you know you can now FaceTime on a Chromebook? You can’t initiate a FaceTime call, but an Apple user running macOS Monterey or iOS/iPadOS 15 or later, can do so by creating and sending a FaceTime link to everyone they wish to invite to the video chat. Click on that link on your Chromebook and it opens as a FaceTime web portal in the Chrome web browser (make sure it’s up to date). Enter your name and tap ‘Continue’, and wait for the host to let you in. You can then enjoy an end-to-end encrypted FaceTime chat despite using a non-Apple device.
Google Duo is a free person-to-person video chat app for up to 32 people; very much like FaceTime, then. You can download a Google Duo app on the Google Play app store, or go to https://duo.google. com and click the Try Duo button to use its web interface. It’s a similar story with Google Meet, the business-grade video conferencing option for up to 250 participants. It used to be exclusively available as part of the paid-for version of G Suite, but it’s now available for free. Download it on the Google Play store, or use the web portal at https://apps.google.com/intl/en/meet .
Another video chat platform that’s available on a Chromebook is Microsoft Teams. Again you access it through a web portal; go to https://teams.microsoft.com in the Chrome browser and sign in with your Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, get one for free at https://account.microsoft. com. Microsoft Teams comes in several flavours. The free version gives unlimited group meetings for up to 60 minutes, up to 100 participants per meeting and 5GB of cloud storage per user. There are various price plans if you need more than this.
As well as the web portal, there’s also a free Microsoft Teams app on the Google Play store. It was designed with Android phones in mind, which is both a blessing and a curse. It retains the shape and layout of the smartphone interface, but you may prefer this if you want to do something else on your Chromebook while using Teams. If not, stick to the web portal.
Two stalwarts of video communication are Skype and Zoom, and both work fine on Chromebooks. Skype has a dedicated app on the Google Play store, and also a web portal found at web.skype.com. Zoom is accessed through a Progressive Web App (PWA), downloaded via Google Play. It’s not as good as using a full Zoom client on a Mac or Windows PC, but it’s very functional and we’re promised updates introducing new features over the next few months.
One app you can’t use on your Chromebook is Messages
