Last night Sarah and I were marveling at Gmail on her phone. That’s a pretty sweet little light-weight app — very intuitive and quite easy to use via WLAN. Pretty much any available WLAN (our house, of course, but also friends’ houses and coffee shops and unsecured wireless networks at/near restaurants or hotels). I got to thinking,
Is there something similar for chat functionality available for her phone?
Of course there is. This morning I stumbled upon Fring. I told it her mobile number and it sent a link to itself via SMS, which I clicked on and started the installation process. About 2 minutes later, we were up and running with
- Skype (including chat functions)
- SkypeOut
- Google Talk (including Gmail Chat functions)
- Yahoo! IM, AIM, ICQ, and MSN chat (all of which we have used in the past, but don’t need very much anymore)
- various SIP providers (none of which have used in the past, but that might be something I can get the Enginerd* to help us with — he seems like a pro)
This software is very cool. Basically it allows you to do VoIP communications through your mobile phone’s internet connection, be that an internet connection via WLAN or 3G or EDGE.
What’s the upshot for you and me? A tighter electronic leash Enhanced communcations availability for Sarah! The next time you chat or call her via Gmail or Skype, it might well be via her phone instead of one of our (several) computers here at home. This will be great for when we’re traveling, for example, to Mexico (instead of paying 4€ a minute to talk, we could paying, um ZERO pesos a minute down at the condo’s WLAN hotspot).
Man, I love technology.