How Can I Tell if Any of my Facetime Contacts are Online and Available?

[Baldy48]

Hello all.

I have an iPAD 2 WiFi with iOS 5.0.1.

Is there any way to tell if a contact in my Facetime contact list is online and available? We use it extensively to stay in touch with our Family (especially our grandchildren) in Chicago. Unfortunately we haven't found a way to determine if our contacts are available for a Facetime call other than "ringing" them in Facetime. The majority of these attempts go unanswered since they're not using their iPads at the time. We've missed Facetime calls from them for the same reason.

There's nothing in Settings that I can find that deals with this function. The user manual is also silent on this matter. If there's an iPad 2 app that supports this type of function, I haven't been able to locate it.

I'd greatly appreciate any help or suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

 

[skimonkey]

Hi Baldy, I don't think that FaceTime has this function. At least when I have used it-there's no indicator as we would see on Skype or Facebook. Now there is an app for Skype that you can use which will say when someone is online. That might be your alternative or maybe setting up a time to "meet" on FaceTime.

Maybe others will know and we just missed it.