Fring, Out!

One neat thing about N82 is that it's very mobile net savvy in a relatively small package. After getting more familiar with the phone, I decided to explore about the internet calling feature. On paper Fring only consumes data packets and leaves the voice channel alone. Sounds like a good usecase in a roaming situation as long as I have WiFi access, in hotels and airports. A few minutes into it though, I removed the app in disgust.
As some of the reviews mentioned, Fring imported the phone book. But what I didn't know was it also imported all the call history. And even though I cleared the history list, it refilled the list every time the application started. No opt-out option. Annoyance 1.
Annoyance 2 happened when I made skype calls. It required way too many clicks to call someone on my contact list: cellular call or skype call, input box with the phone number, and manually added the international signature '+'. Then call. It required to add the international dialing signature '+' to every number, regardless of calling international or domestic numbers. The app already knew my phone number so it could have figured out whether that was a domestic or long distance call. In addition, annoyance 3, Fring gave no option to let the user just enter and call a number. It has to be called either from the phone book or the skype contact list.
However, what topped it all was it changed my phone preferences [03/25/2008: it was the installation changed the preferences]. It increased my ringtone volume to almost full, shut off vibrate, set the ringtone for repeated play and turned on the warning tone. Bottom line, if you change my settings, you are sooo going home!

The binary was Fring92.sis.

PS. A lot of friends have asked me about iSkoot. I don't give a second thought about them because its business case is just flawed. The 2 biggest usecases of VoIP are to avoid expensive long distance and roaming minutes. iSkoot uses both voice minutes and data to make a call. Why would I want that?!!