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Pros and cons, review of Fring

Fring is my favorite mobile IM client since I changed to Nokia S60 smartphone. It is the first really mobile VoIP software I used. Today, I received the notification that it is updated to version 3.40.28/29. This update just fix some bugs and there is no major improvement. So the Pros and cons of Fring remain the same.

Pros:

1. Fring support multiple IM networks including MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, Skype, SIP, AIM/ICQ, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Especially, the support of Skype is not difficult to find from other mobile IM software (another one I know is Nimbuzz).
2. The voice quality of Fring’s mobile VoIP is fairly good. It keeps the balance between the data rate and voice quality quite well. Fring will use about 1MB data traffic for 6 minutes call, whichs make it even work over GPRS/EDGE.
3. Fring integrate with the system pretty well. I like its call history list very much. And the connection management is also impressive.
4. Fring has plenty of add-ons, including WeFi, Gmail notifier, Last.fm and so on. It also provides web interactions like FringMe and Friends Finder.
5. It supports audio, video, image and any other kind of file transfer.
6. The power consumption control of Fring is really excellent. The extra power cost of keeping Fring online with EDGE is less than 50% during standby, while other programs like Nimbuzz, Palringo, TiviPhone will increase power consumption by more than 500%.

Cons:

1. Requirement of Video call support may be too high, but only support text chat on Yahoo and AIM/ICQ is a real pity. The Facebook support is also not good enough.
2. There is always notable delay of voice even on WiFi. I guess it is because all data exchanges have to go through Fring’s server.
3. Fring doesn’t have voice message option is really a disadvantage to me.

Despite the cons I listed above, Fring is my first choice of Mobile IM software. Hope those shortcomings can be
improved in new versions in the future.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Applications, Free, Mobile, SIP, VoIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Pros and cons, review of Fring”

  1. [...] users to test is a IM client not only supporting text chat  and etc but also voice call. As Fring is my favorite mobile VoIP software, its Android version is a plus to motivate me to have an Android phone like Motorola [...]

  2. [...] to Fring, as one of the best mobile IM/VoIP software, Nimbuzz had no clear method to make profit. This makes [...]

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