Subscribe to RSSWithout SIP support, Fring is just not interesting
I’ve put Fring on my phone twice. Once a few months back, and again today.
Both times, I removed the app to free up the phone memory and bandwidth soon afterwards.
The first time, it was an earlier beta and while very impressive in terms of using GPRS for voice, it was a bit flakey and never really performed very well (I never was able to make a call where the quality was even slightly tolerable using GPRS). That kind of thing is to be expected in beta code and I applaud Fring for making the app available.
Today I installed the latest Fring app on an N80 with wi-fi connection. Fring has done a good job making the installation slick and easy. Kudos on that. It has Skype and Gtalk interconnect now too. But at the end of the day, it comes back to, who am I going to call? Few people I call regularly have a phone capable of using Fring, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t bother. There’s a better chance we’d be on the same mobile network, than that we’d both have a Fring account. I mostly talk to grown-ups so Skype doesn’t reach many of the people that I talk to regularly.
If it supported SIP calls, the whole thing gets a lot more interesting. As it is, it’s cute, and impressive in some ways, but not particularly useful.
UPDATE: the saga continues here, March 19, 2007 (Fring announced SIP support, but their system won’t send me the SMS, so I cannot test it).
3 People have left comments on this post
exceptional Mar 16, 2007 - 06:03:44regarding your post on fring (http://www.toyz.org/mrblog/archives/00000275.html) where you wrote "If it supported SIP calls, the whole thing gets a lot more interesting." - well check out the fring blog (http://www.fring.com/blog/?p=27) - I think it has just become a lot more interesting
Now there is SIP
Cool! Kudos to Fring. Right now, my phone isn’t getting their SMS for some reason to setup the account, but if I can get past that issue, I’ll check it out again and post an updated blog entry.