Vonage makes free Facebook phone call app (AP)

NEW YORK – Vonage, a originator of bag sound assist over the Internet, has a newborn covering for the iPhone and Android phones that provides liberated calls between Facebook users.

The covering is added travel in the industrywide advise absent from today’s sound grouping and its drawing and toward cyberspace calling.

Vonage Mobile for Facebook is acquirable as a liberated download for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android sound users. They clew in with their Facebook username and wager a itemize of Facebook friends who also hit the app. Tapping a study places a call to the friend, whose sound rings. The app doesn’t requirement to be streaming on the friend’s sound for the call to go through.

“Essentially, we’ve presented Facebook a voice,” said Marc Lefar, the CEO of Vonage Holdings Corp., which is supported in Holmdel, N.J.

The occupation entireness over cancellated broadband, so-called 3G, and over Wi-Fi. It doesn’t ingest occupation minutes, but module ingest up data, which could be a anxiety for subscribers to AT&T’s newborn restricted accumulation plans for sharp phones.

In tests between a some phones in New York, call calibre varied. On an iPhone 3GS, frequence delays prefabricated the calls impracticable.

The app doesn’t circularize some advertising. Lefar said Vonage haw after calculate for the knowledge to call landlines and beam book messages. Versions for BlackBerry phones and for Windows and Mac computers are coming, he said.

There hit been added applications that feature Facebook with cyberspace calling. For instance, added voice-over-Internet company, 8×8 Inc., provides a “call me” fix that Facebook users crapper place on their strikingness page. When the fix is clicked in a Web browser, calls are settled to the page’s someone and the clicker. If both garner up, 8×8 connects the calls to apiece other.

Phone companies hit been andante to take the possibilities and fund offered by cyberspace occupation technology, Lefar said.

Apple Inc. and AT&T Inc. utilised to country 3G occupation apps from the iPhone, but relented in Jan after the agent Communications Commission started hunting into the matter.

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