Truphone offers free calls from Facebook

TECHIES at Truphone – the mobile VoIP specialist – have come up with another jolly good wheeze. This time it's an app to run on Facebook which enables you to make free phone calls.

Truphone is claiming that this latest app – known as 'Call Me' – is a sector first in that it provides a moveable button that can be dropped anywhere on Facebook that accepts attachments.

So Call Me can be embedded within a Facebook message; can be posted onto a friend's wall; or dropped into a Facebook group.
Truphone's Dean Elwood – who helped create Call Me, is particularly proud of the fact that the app works within Facebook so users don't have to quit the service to make the call.

“We never make a user leave Facebook or have to pick up another device such as a phone. Instead we've embedded a softphone into Facebook,” Elwood claimed.

That's not quite true since you still need to do a bit of tesing initially. You need to ensure, for example, that you have a microphone and speaker working before placing the first call. The biggest irony was that the earphone and mike that the INQ ended up using was supplied by Skype.

Having tested it out before making the first call - which the INQ placed highly successfully - it turned out that the call quality was pretty good too.

The best news is that you don't actually need to load the Truphone VoIP application onto your smartphone to get Call Me to work.

In Canada and the USA, you can use a regular cellphone number to accept calls fromTruphone. In the rest of the world, you have to provide a fixed line number. Truphone currently coverrs 40 countries.

The best bit is that if you successfully register your Truphone number in the UK, if you're out of range [Truphone uses Wi-fi], then your smartphone will ring anyway because its cellular number acts as a fall-back.

The INQ has spent ages playing with Call Me and every feature which Truphone claims to offer, will actually work. But the software relies on Java running in conjunction with your browser.

And as a Truphone help desk agent admitted, there are at present 'some issues' with the Truphone app conflicted with other software which the PC is running.

Once these buggettes have been ironed out, the Call Me app will prove very useful – especially for penniless students, for example. µ

L'INQs
Truphone

See also
Mobile free VoiP service makes leap forward