Jianjun's Blog

Fring is an integrated instant messaging/VoIP service that works on your mobile device. With Fring, you can log into your Skype, Twitter, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, ICQ, AIM, Fring and SIP accounts simultaneously over wireless plans such as EDGE, GPRS and WIFI.

Fring promises encrypted data transfer when you submit credentials of these services through the mobile interface, giving you peace of mind.

Once you are logged in, it automatically imports all your contacts. A green icon means the contact is online and available. Away, busy or unavailable buddies are marked orange. When a buddy is offline, the icon turns gray.

Fring’s intuitive interface makes you feel at home the first time you use it. As you see in the photo above, Chinese characters in my MSN buddy’s name are nicely displayed.

Fring client is currently localized into 6 languages, including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish. As they are still in Beta, I expect to see more languages over time and more professional translations.

Now Chinese users may feel confused when they see ‘On/Off’ under the ‘Show Fring Signature’, etc. menus being translated as “连接/断开”(Connect/Disconnect). Some other problems also need to be addressed.

How much bandwidth does Fring use and how about the sound quality?

Fring Support says each 1M bandwidth equals to 15 minutes of Fring call (Fring to Fring). I tried it on my EDGE plan. The bandwidth usage of the one-minute Fring test call was around 90K, and the sound quality was amazingly good! SkypeOut and SIP (I use FWD) calls, however, were not as satisfactory – in other words, you can’t use them for any serious communication and they use too much bandwidth. 3G/WIFI connections should give much better quality.

You can set Fring to run in the background if instant mobile messaging is important to you. When you receive a message or a call via Fring, it’ll alert you with distinctive tones. But the software does eat your battery. When I had it in the background for about 20 minutes, the battery became hot too.

Overall, Fring is still useful when you are traveling but suddenly have something urgent to discuss with your friend on MSN or you simply want to catch up with the Twitterati while waiting for your plane at the airport.

Fring website

After some research and secret testing, I decided to launch a Chinese teaching podcast blog at a separate domain. The podcast will mainly focus on people who never learned any Chinese. The service teaches everyday conversations and will be absolutely free of charge.

The whole course will start with simple greetings and then extend into longer and more challenging situational modules. I plan to give a 5-10 minute class each week with accompanying text materials such as new word list, additional vocabulary and other relevant information.

Since the course will be a one-man show – at least in the beginning – to prevent listeners getting bored quickly, I will try to make each class as short, useful and interesting as possible. While I’m preparing (finding sound clips, writing syllabus, etc.) for the formal launch of the podcast, as always I appreciate any suggestions from you. Although this service is of an amateur nature, I’d like to ensure its quality.

Stay tuned!

OoVoo (what’s ooVoo? Read this post.) recently sent a survey request to users asking for feedback on its functions and possible improvements. Most of the survey questions compared ooVoo to Skype, which gave me a feeling that they were committed (and in the end ready) to grab some market share from that big brother.

However, a few days later when a new version of ooVoo came into being, it only let me down. Instead of offering more useful features, it takes away some of the coolest and charges a fee if you want them back.

The standard (free) ooVoo option now only has these: