With growing popularity of Internet calling, VoIP phone systems are being adopted all across the board, ranging from small businesses to large corporations. Because VoIP uses digital technology, there are possibilities for VoIP to be bundled with other digital services like short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS). For Google (News - Alert), the much anticipated integration is growing closer.
Google on Thursday released its much talked about Hangouts 2.0 update for Android (News - Alert). It can be downloaded directly from Google Play. As reported by the technology news site The Next Web, the new version supports both SMS and MMS (on Android 4.0+), animated GIFs, and one-tap location sharing. Per Hangouts description, the one-tap option is as simple as tapping the new pin icon at the bottom right-hand corner of the app. Next, Hangouts collects your immediate position and places it within the conversation stream as a Google Maps thumbnail.
The report indicates that with SMS/MMS support, Hangouts can now be used as your default app for both traditional texting and picture messaging in addition to Web-based instant messaging. In addition, animated GIFs can also play in parallel.
Meanwhile, iPhone (News - Alert) users are waiting for the iOS version of Google Hangouts. Given Apple’s stringent requirements for its iOS platform, analysts believe that it will be difficult for Google to offer all the Android features to the iPhone users.
However, support for Google Voice is not here yet. In a blog post on Google+, Nikhyl Singhal, Google’s product manager of Hangouts, expressed a concern that needs to be overcome before it can securely merge Voice with Hangouts on Android. That means, it is going to take some more time.
In a blog message, Singhal wrote, “Unfortunately, today’s update does not work with Google Voice numbers unless you’ve enabled Google Voice on your Sprint (News - Alert) phone. But rest assured, we’re working to support SMS messages for all Google Voice phone numbers by early next year. And don’t worry, your voice number will go unchanged.”
While many people are thrilled to hear Voice will finally support MMS and become a part of Hangouts in early 2014, Google is also planning to close down all third-party apps that relied on the service for free texting and VoIP calling. Per Singhal’s post, these apps will cease to function on May 15, 2014.
Edited by Blaise McNamee