In his column (free subscription required) for the New York Times today, columnist David Pogue compares the audio/video capabilities of Apple’s newly released iChat AV beta and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger 6. “…Microsoft, true to tradition, has focused on expanding its list of features, while Apple has worked toward elegance and simplicity. Messenger is a cacophony of brightly colored buttons, panels, blinking advertisements and, in the new version, animated (and even homemade) smileys; iChat AV maintains the clean lines and brushed-metal “surfaces” of its text-only predecessors,” writes Pogue.