It wins on simplicity, ease of use and deep integration, and for those alone, I can’t stop recommending this.Viber is a free messaging and calling app that connects over a billion people worldwide. The people who I want to call most are already on Viber and I keep finding more on my phone book registering on Viber every day. If Viber can integrate similar features and release on more mobile platforms, Microsoft’s purchase of Skype will start to look like a bad mistake.Īs for me I am already a convert. The one thing that still gives Skype a slight edge is video calling and ability to make VOIP to regular phone calls via SkypeOut. Once installed the app starts automatically and works in the background. Viber doesn’t bring anything new to the table but it does what it does very well. I guess I can’t complain much as this is whole regular phone calls are – you can’t block anyone from calling you if he or she already have your number. If there is one nitpick I find with Viber is unfortunately I have not seen a way to block calls from other Viber users who happens to have your number. Suffice to say I believe it to be negligible and the cost saving associated with using Viber offsets any concern with power usage. I have not extensively tested how much Viber has impacted the battery life on my Galaxy S2, but so far I have not see any dramatic decrease in battery life. If someone isn’t on Viber, a pop up notification will inform you that the user isn’t on Viber and gives you an option to make a regular call through your carrier. Viber also integrates wells with the Android phone book, allowing you to dial anyone via Viber. The app helpfully lets you know how the network quality is and what to expect. I found voice quality to be comparable to a normal GSM phone call, even on a 3G network and better than Skype. This isn’t set in stone, as it really depends on how talkative you are and network condition. As Viber is built from the ground up to work on mobile data networks, the engineers had to make sure that it doesn’t use more data than it has to.īased on testing, I found that a typical 4 minute Viber calls only uses about 600KB of downloaded data. This is called VoIP and works not differently from other VoIP services like Skype. Well, not strictly free as you do need to pay for a data plan. Viber calls are free because phone calls are routed through WiFi or packet data (GPRS, HSPA etc.). You can enable pop up notification for new texts. For a more complete free text messaging system, I suggest getting WhatsApp. Unfortunately it only supports basic texts. Finally, as Viber also supports free data messages, there is a separate tab for it. You can pin contacts into a favourite sub menu. The contacts tab shows you contacts that are on Viber as well as everyone else who isn’t. You get to see all recent and missed calls (including those made via Viber and normal phone calls). In fact the dialler is a straight copy off the one on the iPhone with a different colour scheme. Viber features a tabbed based UI suspiciously similar to the iPhone phone app. The neat thing about Viber is the app also a universal phone dialler, allowing you to dial other none Viber users on a traditional phone line. Once activated (a process that took me a couple of seconds), the app scanned my phone book and found 12 of my contacts that was also on Viber. This would mean having to give out your number to people. Viber is different from many other VoIP services in that instead of requiring you to create a new login, it uses your phone number as an identifier, not at all dissimilar to WhatsApp. The Android version recently graduated from beta and is now available to the Android Market. In fact it has been downloaded over 12 million times on Apple’s app store. Viber is a popular VoIP and free messaging service on the iOS platform.
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