FriendCaller Blog

The speed is in need of cool apps. One year later and the situation for mobile bandwidth in the US changed totally. Last summer I spent 2 months in the US working in our Silicon Valley office. Back then it was struggle to get decent mobile data connections and many user lamenting for the need for speed, the bandwidth was really low and often no data was available at all, despite of a full signal.

This year I returned for few weeks to Silicon Valley, and everything has changed. AT&T improved its network significantly and Verizon started LTE service. Now you can experience a decent 3 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload with AT&T in most places. On Verizon LTE I have seen even more speed. Another thing changed, operators are actively looking for cool apps to promote the new mobile data performance. And, they do not block our FriendCaller Voice and Video call services anymore and yes, right now you can make Video calls over 3G and 4G in the US.

AT&T 3G Speedtest

We are waiting now for Apple’s approval for our FriendCaller for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad app. Once this update is out you can experience first hand how much fun Video calling from mobile to mobile on Wi-Fi, 3G/4G or to any browser at home, anyway you want.

Video telephony is a term that most people are familiar with, and FriendCaller now supports video telephony. It is not easy to achieve video telephony, as it requires a significant amount of development and testing to ensure seamless functionality.

While working to integrate video telephony into FriendCaller, we asked ourselves about the origins of video calling. When did the idea first come to fruition? Let’s take a look at the early beginnings of video telephony, and follow its development path to see how it has evolved over the years.

Paul St. George's Telectroscope installation

The idea of video telephony is as old as the telephone and the television. During the last part of the 19th century, this idea was referred to as “Telectroscope“. A few decades later, the world’s first public videophone was developed in Germany. In 1938, this service was introduced between Berlin, Nuremberg and Munich. People used public television stations to call each other.

AT&T Picturephone

In the 1960s, then AT&T introduces its so-called Picturephone. However, it cost US$16 to make a three minute call, so there was very little interest in the technology because it was cost-prohibitive for the masses. In subsequent years, several countries attempted to make the video telephony accessible to a wider audience, however, voice calls remained the standard for communication, due to the high costs associated with video calling.

Due to significant technology advances, made possible by high-speed Internet, Video telephony finally came into its prime during the 21st century. It was popularized by free Internet services such as Skype, iChat and ICQ, which made video telephony more attractive to the masses, due to its cost-effectiveness.

The widespread use of smartphones has also driven the development and adoption of an increasing number of video telephony applications, including Fring and Tango, as well as Skype, which was one of the first developers to offer video telephony for iOS and Android devices. The collaboration between Skype and Facebook recently published video telephony on Facebook, but to function, Facebook’s video calling requires the user to install software, which varies based on the browser and OS combination.

Today, however, there is only one browser-based video calling solution that provides echo-free sound WITHOUT headphones, and that is FriendCaller. With FriendCaller, users benefit from the ability to make hassle free video calls to those with whom they want to stay connected. They can make face-to-face video calls, anytime or anywhere, with their FriendCaller contacts, and even with friends who are not yet registered with FriendCaller using their personal CallMe-Link.

Video calling made easy! Make your first FriendCaller video call today!

Based on the Q1’11 smartphone market figures released by Gartner earlier this month, we identified that it is the mobile freedom afforded by the Android ecosystem, that has driven its meteoric rise to the top, leaving Symbian, RIM and even the Apple iPhone trailing behind.

One of the features that support mobile freedom is third-party software (i.e. FriendCaller) access to the Android’s dialer. Today, smartphones come with an integrated dialer application that is used to make outgoing calls on the phone’s wireless network. When using FriendCaller on an Android phone, you are given a choice – either use the dialer to place a call through your wireless operator’s network, or use FriendCaller to place a call with the same dialer.

Why is this a big deal, you ask? By using FriendCaller with your smartphone’s dialer, you can make international phone calls and pay only a few cents per minute, versus the $1.99 per minute that your operator typically charges for overseas calls. For example, to call our Taiwan office would cost us $ 3.49 with AT&T, or just $0.03 with FriendCaller. These savings alone illustrate the importance of this Android feature!

However, based on feedback from our users, we have found that this may not be true for all Android handsets. In fact, many of our users have told us that they are not able to access their phone’s dialer through FriendCaller. Because, we thought that this might be a bug or a glitch, we tested an Android phone, the HTC Desire, and discovered that as reported by our users, FriendCaller did not show up on the phone’s dialer.

A quick test of our friendly competitor’s applications delivered same result. Evidently, the HTC Desire’s platform remains firmly closed to third-party applications. This reminded us of a TechCrunch post about Android 3.0 “Open” that attacked Google for insisting tablet makers release Android 3.0 unmodified, and drove an intensive debate about “how open is the Android ecosystem?” This debate finally triggered a response from Google Android boss Tim Bray defending Android.

Tim’s point is that Android devices should conform with some basic compatibility requirements to deliver the best possible user experience. Those of us at FriendCaller believe that access to the Android’s dialing application should be one of these points! Tim, please keep the dialer open!

Over the next few days, we will be taking a closer look at this issue, and asking our users this important question – Is your phone open or closed to mobile freedom? Please send us your comments and a screenshot of your phone’s dialer. Anyone who sends us a screenshot of their phone’s dialer will be entered to win an “open” handset. Additionally, all participants will receive a voucher that can be redeemed on FriendCaller to make international phone calls. Here is a quick guide to making a screenshot. Or, if you are unable to make a screenshot of your dialer, simply take a snapshot of the dialer with your digital camera.

Please send your dialer’s screenshot, your phone’s manufacture and model number with a short note to kim(at)c2call.com.

Today, we removed the FriendCaller OS2 version of FriendCaller Instant VoIP from the iTunes store. We did this primarily because it no longer makes sense for us to support OS2 devices, as the number of these devices is quickly dwindling, and OS2 lacks many of the cool features that make FriendCaller so addictive. Furthermore, our latest FriendCaller iOS apps are no longer able to support OS2.

While FriendCaller Instant VoIP was pre push-notification, pre-multitask, pre-almost every cool iPhone OS feature, it was indeed a solid VoIP app. Removing it from iTunes is bittersweet for us because this version was the beginning of the FriendCaller success story. Beating Skype to the punch, FriendCaller Instant Voice was released one week prior to the Skype iPhone app. In fact, FriendCaller was responsible for helping to initiate VoIP functionality for the iPhone, as we were one of the earliest VoIP apps, if not the first full-featured app with both VoIP to VoIP calling capabilities and super cheap calls to direct dial phone numbers.

Early on, FriendCaller clearly demonstrated its capabilities to use the iPhone’s state-of-the-art audio hardware to support crystal clear calls via the Internet. This feature alone was a key selling point for our end-users, since at that time the voice quality of AT&T’s network was suffering due to the iPhone’s rapid success. Suddenly, VoIP calls over WiFi made with FriendCaller delivered much better voice quality than networks calls.

When we launched FriendCaller, we could never have anticipated that the app would become so popular, achieving millions of downloads after it was first approve for sale via the iTunes store. That was in March 2009, when a couple of hundred downloads per day were considered a huge success. If someone would have told us back then that within one year, FriendCaller would become the most successful Social Networking app on iTunes, with only four others apps (all games) grossing more than FriendCaller, we would have told you to dream on!

This dream did come true for us, and in 2010 FriendCaller ranked number five on the iTunes Store’s “Top Grossing Overall” list. Now, two major iOS updates later, it is time to say goodbye to the good old OS2 version, and send it off for a well-deserved retirement. The FriendCaller success story will continue, not only through our iPhone apps, but also through FriendCaller for Android. When searching for VoIP in the Android Market, you find that FriendCaller regularly appears on its list of top ranking apps.