LONDON: WhatsApp can compete with its biggest rivals, Skype and Viber due to support of Voice Calls on Android. VoIP communication is the “next best thing” for the people who want to keep in touch with their friends who live in all parts of the globe. Instead of calling a landline from a mobile phone and pay a big monthly bill to your mobile network operator, you can install a messaging application and make free calls to any user who has the same application installed on his/her device. But which one is better?
In the future, mobile network carriers will have to come up with attractive data-rich plans and to offer cheaper international calling, otherwise they’ll lose their customers. The competition is fierce and the companies trample each other to offer the best prices, while messaging applications are at war with each other on another front. The world of VoIP applications has currently three big names Skype, Viber and WhatsApp the latter offers free calls only from WhatsApp to WhatsApp.
Viber came in December 2010 and managed to gain around 500 million users, which represent 1/12th of the world’s population and its success is due to the fact that the application aimed both mobile and desktop platforms, targeting home users, organizations and businessmen, while Skype is addressing more to the last two categories of users. And the company knew what the customers what: free calling and a good service that will help them save money. And Viber is excellent for making free calls from Viber-to-Viber, and when it comes to calling from Viber to a mobile/landline number, the rates are very low; starting from 1.2 cents/minute, but every country has a different tariff. The users can make calls even from their PCs, if they have headphones with a microphone.
Skype doesn’t need any introduction, as it was introduced 11 years ago and went through a lot of improvements to reach its current state. It uses the best audio and video codecs to offer HD quality calls, but it consumes a lot of bandwidth, so if you install it on your smartphone, make sure you have a big data plan.
WhatsApp is offering free voice calls, but only the Android users have been spoiled with a version that allows them to enable this feature on their smartphones. The iOS, Windows Phone and the rest of platforms will have to wait until WhatsApp will make this feature available for them as well.
