Skype and Viber

[Nick30]

Who uses an iPhone to chat with their mahals for free.
I got an iPhone 4S for my birthday a fortnight ago and so my mahal has one too and it feels so great to chat with her for free although with wifi it's much better.

[lastlid]

My wife has an iPad2 and I have an iPhone. She is here in the UK now. We chat, when I am at work using wifi.
Facetime looks good too but we rarely use, it out of habit.

[grahamw48]

If I had an iPhone I'd sell it and spend the money on an airticket.

[Tawi2]

Did you ever go and see the lady nick?

[South-east boy]

I tested the skype on my phone the other day with Viva and yeah, it worked, but I think I need a decent connection. I'll have to check about Viber and Viva has a Blackberry & the last time I checked Viber wasn't available on it, but it was coming very soon.

Since Yahoo stopped working on my iphone since they did a crap app update and killed it, I can't chat on it on my phone, so we use whatsapp a lot and the good thing about that is that you don't have to be logged in to receive a message, but the downside is that you can't have chat logs. It's also handy to send pics as you don't have to pay like you do with sending them by text. It says you can send chat messages to your email address, but when I tried that, it didn't work.

[stevewool]

brought my Em a iron

[Dedworth]

brought my Em a iron

Well done Steve

[South-east boy]

brought my Em a iron

I just found out that I need a new one as the current one is leaking water!

[Dedworth]

[somebody]

If group video chat is what is needed a few other options are

A free service from AOL http://www.aol.com/av/
and a service which one guy runs but now has various apps just avoid the existing rooms and read up the instructions which are straightforward http://www.reelportal.com/

Plus of course sign up for google plus and use their hangouts service which can now be used on some androids and Iphone and Ipads (if a person on a pc invites to a hangout) works very well and can be made private by only inviting those you share with...

[Steve.r]

My asawa just told me about Viber, she has an iphone and I have and android. I downloaded it and it works a treat. My phone is connected via wifi at home so a good connection, likewise for her. I will use this again as you can also use it for sending text messages for free.

What I would like to know is if you have a download limit like 500mb of data on a contract per month, how much for example would a 10 minute chat use of that data ?? any tekies fancy answering that one for me

[South-east boy]

We chat on Whatsapp a lot and never have problems with the data limit. Not tried actual phonecalls very often because of the time difference and we use Skype at weekends. I tried the Skype video call and that works ok, though the view through the front camera of myself is not so flattering! Lol! I would think that uses a fair bit more data as it has the live pictures too.

I think there are ways to check how much data you have used so far during the current month on your phone (but maybe depends on which phone you have?), bu if you can't, maybe ring your network up and ask them how much you've used so far?

[Steve.r]

Cheer Tim,

I can see my data useage but they state that the information displayed can be up to 48 hours old Not sure if I could make one call and wait for 48 hours before I did anything else on my phone lol

[lastlid]

I had a 10GB bolt on data allowance with my iphone. I used it to tether to my laptop and run my laptop on the internet from the iphone sim card. 10GB was good for extensive browsing, email, skype, yahoo messenger and some downloading. Whilst I think that 10Gb was adequate for that purpose each month, I can imagine it will be a lot tighter on 500MB, which is a fraction of 10GB ( 5%). 500mb per month is "light usage".

Since my wife has arrived in the UK and I do very little Skying and Yahooing and since now I have been getting free wifi at my current address and at work, I reduced my bolt on tariff to the 500mb allowance, which I use only when I am outdoors away from any wifi hotspots. This works well. The below might give you an indication.....

How much mobile phone data do I need?

Some downloads and apps are easier to measure than others. For instance, if app you're about to download is as large as 100 Mb, or even more, it should clearly stated in the app description section, so you can decide if you want download it using your inclusive data package.

However, other functions that are part of your everyday use may consume a varying amount of data and could catch you by surprise.

For instance, some of your emails might have large attachments that may take a lot of data to download, or some webpages may have more video or image content than others, which means they use more data to download.

Vodafone use the following assumptions to calculate how much mobile internet data the following activities could approximately take:

Action: data usage (amount downloadable with a 500MB allowance)

Download a webpage: 100kB (5000 pages) Check your email: approx. 100kB per email (500 000 basic, 1,000 with attachments) Instant message: 100kB per Instant Messenger session (500 hours) Download a document: 100kB per page (5000 pages) Download a song: 5MB per music track (100 songs) Download a photo: 2MB per photo (250 photos) Watch a video: 1000kB per minute of video watching. (1 hour of watching)

From this link...http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/guide...ta_allowances/

[Steve.r]

Good link, thanks

This is from the Viber support page:

The bandwidth rate during a Viber call is minimal. It is approximately:

240 KB per minute up and down,

14 MB per hour up and down.

I just contacted Orange (my provider) and they upped my data to 1Gb for free no worries now

[South-east boy]

If you are able to add the Onavo app as it shrinks the data that you're using allowing you to use more.