Nimbuzz, the mobile chat client, has launched VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for Google’s mobile Android platform. What this does is enable you to make free and cheap phone calls through this aggregate chat client in order to speak directly with any of your contacts. Using VoIP on Android phones directly through Nimbuzz lets you talk for free with other Nimbuzz users. As an aggregate chat client, Nimbuzz also supports VoIP calls over Skype, Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger.
In addition, Nimbuzz also supports a slightly wider array of chat clients for text chat, including Facebook chat. The ability to have a single profile that pulls in friends from multiple chat clients and social networks makes Nimbuzz and similar products useful conversation tools, minimizing your need to install, access and operate multiple conversation tools at once. The incorporation of VoIP for Android just further rounds out the jack-of-all-trades effect that Nimbuzz offers to its mobile users.
The benefit of VoIP calls is of course that they’re often free or vastly cheaper than using a land line or your cell phone minutes. With unlimited data plans being offered on a wide range of smart phones these days, the ability to use your mobile device to make free calls (not including your data plan) adds a level of convenience to the applications currently available in mobile markets.
Nimbuzz is also proactive in its efforts to release VoIP on Google Android phones, as Android is a growing platform that shows promise but has yet to reach the size and presence of Apple’s iPhone app platform. The benefit of this desire to be among the first to market is the fact that Nimbuzz has few competitors on Android-supported devices, making it among the more prominent of chat aggregation and VoIP apps for cell phones.
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While there are Skype apps available for Android devices, and more still for Yahoo! and AOL, they are not always offered directly from the service provider and operate as third party apps providing access to a service you’re already familiar with and may have been using for several years. That leaves Fring as one of Nimbuzz’s largest competitors, as Fring has also been rather proactive in its efforts to permeate the mobile space.
Google’s Android may also offer a more flexible developer platform for the types of apps that can be made available in the Android Market, as Google seemingly has a less dominating approval process than what Apple has demonstrated in the past couple of years. Google Voice is another VoIP-integrated system from the company, which was apparently too competitive with Apple in a direct sense, getting it banned from the iPhone App Store.
Knowing the frustrations that lie behind an inability to offer an app on a mobile platform may give Google a unique perspective on what it extends to its own developer community. As this relates to Nimbuzz, any potential competition between its service and Google’s own offerings could ultimately be controlled by Google, but this does not appear to be an immediate concern.
The result is an interesting use of an existing app, as Nimbuzz continues to update its service to appeal to a growing mobile user base seeking the convenience of an all-inclusive communication hub. As Nimbuzz seeks to gain further prevalence in this space, it looks to the Android platform to help it gain visibility while establishing itself as a useful consumer product.
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