The long awaited voice calls over one of the biggest IM service providers, Whatsapp, is now available. By upgrading your version of Whatsapp to the latest you will notice that you now have a phone icon on your chat sessions, if you were already on the latest version this service will be automatically enabled. The app developer has been making some major strides recently, even introducing a PC based web interface for Whatsapp, by incorporating and innovative barcode scanner.
You can also get to the call menu by just clicking on the avatar of your contact. The service uses your default ringtone when you are receiving a call and you answer by sliding the green answers icon across your screen, just like you would when answering a normal call.
Voice quality seems to be good, however I did notice that there was a significant delay in the conversation. But this is expected, and I'm sure the guys over at Whatsapp will have this resolved in the near future. Data usage is also minimal, not to sure what codec they are using but it is providing good audio quality, which may also be the cause of the delay, but we shouldn't rule out South Africa's "state of the art" broadband network.
Whatsapp currently does not have any settings for voice calls, so you can't tweak it to work in your current network conditions. But it is still early stages for the IM provider and I'm sure that they are going to introduce Whatsapp to fixed and mobile number calls, of course this is a service that you will surely have to pay for and I'd like to see what the charges amount to.
I currently use FNB Connect and R50 gets me about an hour of calls to mobile numbers and is per second billing as well. Call quality is also good, the competition will be healthy to bring down call charges. It may even start to impact the mobile network providers and hopefully they will be able to bring down their charges as well!