Some described it as a ballsy move today, when Fring announced the availability of their client on iPhone. The folks at Fring are doing this without Apple’s blessing, using the Jailbreak installer. Are they thumbing their noses at Apple, or just trying to steal a march on the inevitable waves of similar applications that will follow? Only the Fring team know for sure.
Fring lasted only a short time on my iPhone I’m afraid. The thousands of contacts I maintain in my Skype, MSN, and GTalk buddy lists took too long to load. Further, I couldn’t actually dial-out using Skype out. The Fring team characterize this release as a pre-release, and I would have to concur. After a few hours of play, I uninstalled it. Nevertheless I was impressed at both the application itself, and the technical wizardry required make it operate in the background on the iPhone. To my knowledge, no other application has that ability. So I’ll try Fring again, after a future update.
If you have a lighter weight buddy list than I do, and a jailbroken iPhone, you may want to check out Fring. It could be just the thing for someone needing inexpensive calling and a multi-headed IM solution on iPhone.
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