I was lucky enough to be asked by Ewan of SMS Text News to write a review of fring. Ewan invited me to sit in on an interview he conducted in Israel a few weeks back at fring Headquarters. We met with some great gentlemen named Boaz Zilberman the co founder, Neal Fullman the PR Director, and Roy Timor-Rousso, VP Product Marketing. They were great hosts and have a nice office. More importantly they have a fantastic mobile instant messaging and VOIP program.

The premise of fring (as I understand) is to give the ability to the end user to make VOIP calls and have IM conversations on your mobile phone, over WiFi and or 3G/EDGE data. Fring is different then many of the other mobile programs I’ve used before in that their implementation and user interface is friendly to a beginner. It is easy to set up and put into use. Since the meeting in Tel Aviv I have used Fring almost every day. That alone should say it all.

Some of the benefits I have found are:

• Mobile IM that just works
• Skype calls without the Skype phone
• I can make calls over my IM sans my MacBook
• fring does not drain my Nokia E61i’s battery any faster then usual
• Auto switching from WiFi to mobile data and back (I wish other programs did this so well!)
• Great sound quality on all my calls
• The user interface is fantastic
• IT JUST PLAIN WORKS

A few draw backs I found are:

• I can’t see Ewan (for example) on Google Chat if we are both using fring at the same time
• When pressing my center button on the D pad of my phone (E61i) fring auto starts a VOIP call, and not an IM like I would prefer
• I can’t seem to refresh my buddy lists so that contacts I have removed disappear.
• I am unable to relog in to MSN via fring after I log in on a different device (I have to exit the program and relog in)

That’s it on the negatives. It is really a well constructed application that I enjoy using.

Keep up the good work fring!

This is my first review and I hope it was adequate. If you have any questions post them in the comments and I will try to answer them.

EDIT: I forgot to go into detail about the auto switching between 3G/EDGE and WiFi connections.  It is amaizing.  I will give it the highest compliment I can, I wish other programs would license the software from fring to do the auto switching, that’s how great it is.   OH and fring is spelled fring and not Fring, my mistake.  It has been corrected.

I was asked by Ewan MacLeod of SMS Text News to write a review of fring. fring is an instant messaging/VOIP service. I was fortunate enough to sit in on an interview done in Tel Aviv, Israel last month conducted by Ewan. Since then I have become a huge fan and user of the service. In turn I was asked to write a review. I’ll publish it in a few days.

Stay tuned.