by alec on April 15, 2008
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.
Third time's the charm, they say. After reading Joanna Stern's recent review of EQO, I decided to try it again. This is the third version of EQO I've tried since first meeting Bill Tam and his team at DEMO 2006, and it's pretty good. Gone are the problems with dropped data connections. It synchs well with MSN and Google Talk, although nearly 4000 contacts in my BlackBerry address broke the contact importer. It's also an acceptable multi-headed IM client for BlackBerry, which I could easily see using a fair bit.
Thursday my BlackBerry started playing an odd ringtone, which I didn't recognize at first. It was Bill calling me using EQO. Voice quality was good, although there was a slight echo (audible to me only) whenever I spoke. Unlike schemes which transfer the voice over a data connection, EQO is using the PSTN. When you make a call using EQO, it finds a local dialing number, connects you to it, and then transfers the coal to EQO's VoIP network, where it's delivered at the other end. Business model wise, EQO is disintermediating the long distance carrier, just as a calling card would, or a VoIP service like Skype or Jajah.
Net net: I had a few hiccups getting it rolling, but all in all it wasn't a bad experience. If you have one of the supported handsets, you may want to check it out.
