VoIP & Gadget News – Viber for Android Beta Launches

Viber today announced Viber, a mobile VoIP app was available for the Android. Viber lets users make free phone calls and send free text messages with their mobile phone. I’ve written about Viber in the past, but didn’t initially see the convenience factor of using a person’s regular phone number to dial someone using Viber. That is, the Viber dialer would automatically detect if the other person is also a Viber user to route the call. This probably explains why they are up to 10M installs. While Skype is great, dialing by username doesn’t work if you don’t know the person’s Skype username. You’re more likely to know their phone number or have it saved in your address book.

Alas, it’s a limited beta release, which they are slowly rolling out. According to their PR:
Being such an in-demand app, Viber will first be offering this release to people who have registered for the Beta on Viber.com, with additional invitations rolled out soon after on a daily basis. Since this is a Beta release, Viber is urging users to report any issues they encounter so that they can be resolved as soon as possible, ensuring Android users receive the same quality of service currently enjoyed by millions of iPhone users.
It supports all the iPhone features and some new ones as well:

Full call screen: whenever a Viber call is received;
Popup text message notification which allows users to respond to text messages without opening Viber;
Tighter integration with the phone to allow users to see their regular call logs and messages inside Viber;
Ability to set Viber as the phone’s default dialer so that users can use the Viber dialer for all of their phone calls, not just for Viber.

Tags: android, iphone, mobile voip, viber, voip, wireless
Related tags: phone number, viber dialer, phone calls, viber viber, viber, users