Fring: Bridge the gap between Skype and your mobile phone

There are certainly worse places to be “incommunicado” on a Saturday afternoon, but whilst visiting the Bizhack.net health editor in Zurich I quickly realised that cross border calls at £0.80 per minute can rack up a hefty monthly bill.

Whilst free wifi seems to be fairly abundant in the center of Zurich, I did not have the luxury of my laptop.  So I set to work to see what I could do with my aging, but wifi enabled, Nokia E61. My first port of call was Skype, a traveler’s natural choice for calling colleagues, friends and family back home.  Skype is testing a new mobile version which looks like it has potential, but costs are starting to creep in.  Once installed on my phone, a call to my Skype online contacts alone would be be the “cost of a local or national call on your mobile.”  There seemed little point, if I had my laptop the same call would be free.

Skype also offers a Windows mobile version as well as a Nokia N800/810 version, sadly I have none of these.  What I needed was something to bridge the gap between my wireless enabled mobile phone and skype.  While there are countless workarounds and hacks listed on the internet, I settled for Fring.

Fring couldn’t be more simple, and it did the job perfectly.  Not only was I up and running on my Skype account in minutes, but I had the option to connect to MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, Twitter, AIM & Yahoo! simultaneously while I was at it.

As an existing SkypeOUT user, I could also make use of SkypeOUT calls through Fring which meant that I could call landline numbers all over the owrld for little more than £0.01 per minute.  As a SkypeIN customer (i.e. Skype provide me with a landline number which I pay for each year) people back home could call it at local rates and it would ring straight on my mobile phone in Zurich.  Price to receive calls? Free.

My prospects of cheap (and even free) calls suddenly seemed much better, and I quickly set about touching base with a miserable and wet London.  Call quality was far from perfect, but this was presumably also dependent on the quality of my wifi connection at the time.  There was also a minor delay, but this did not prove to be too much of a hindrance.

Fring boasts remarkably small bandwidth, and states that a 60 minute VOIP call would consume in the region of 8mb of internet data.  For local users who have an internet package on their mobile phone, Fring might even be an option in the absence of wifi.  At the very least, users would be able to keep in touch over instant messaging and with unlimited internet becoming the rule rather than the exception, instant messaging on mobile phones might even start to replace the text message.

For all of Fring’s miraculous qualities there was only one real show stopper, namely the subsequent reduced battery life.  Fring as a program is not too consuming on a phone, but a constant connection to the internet with multiple accounts, calls and messages can start to take its toll, so make sure you have your charger at the ready if you plan to have it on all day.

It was only when my jubilant celebrations at the prospect of unrestricted communications had slightly subsided that I had my true epiphany.  As the world drifted calmly by and the late afternoon sun began to cast its orange glow on the River Limmat I wondered why on earth I would want to be in contact with colleagues, friends and family back home in the first place?  Fring could certainly wait for the time being.  I put my phone back in my pocket and ordered another cappuccino.