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It’s a new month, and Yahoo has just released a new beta of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista with support for voice calls (both PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone) and free text messaging (SMS).
The voice calls support their free PC-to-PC calling, but to make calls to a landline or cell phone you’ll need to purchase a Phone Out account. The rates are really competitive though, starting at 1 cent/minute.
Free SMS text messaging is a real deal. Just type in the cell phone number for your friend and send them a message. Note that though this is free to you, your friend may incur charges to receive the text message, so check with them first. I tried it and it worked. I might even use this instead of my phone, at least when I’m sitting in front of my PC. I can type a lot faster on my PC keyboard than on my cell phone!
Here’s a brief video from Yahoo showing the new features:
Thanks for the update, Yahooligan. I’ve downloaded and installed YM for Vista (beta 1.2.0.1029), and it is certainly better than the last build. I’m not a phone or SMS fan, but the IM certainly works for me. Apart from that, there’s a whole slew of emoticons included (unlike the earlier build) yay!
However, there’s still zip about changing fonts and font sizes in chat windows, and I don’t like the fact that my typing area is very narrow and constricted (no Send button either). Hopefully this will be fixed soon. But all in all, not a bad build, unlike the last one which I uninstalled before the first hour was up.
Thanks for the post, Yahooligan! I’ve just installed it, but I’m having trouble getting it to connect through my Squid proxy. I’ll try tonight from home and report back.
I got it working tonight (without the proxy issue) and tested the SMS feature. I sent an SMS to my cell phone number. The first text message I received said “The Yahoo! Messenger user “jeff.hester” has sent you a message. Reply with “y” to this message to accept. For more info, visit mobile.yahoo.com.”
I replied via SMS with “y” and a minute or so later received the message.
Here’s what the interface looks like in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista:
[attach]1321[/attach]
They should be more clear about the “free” sms service as it only applies to america at present and everybody else is left out again.
I’ve been using this beta since it was released and found quite a few bugs with it and have sent a few feedback reports with them.
It’s still laggy as ever and just doesn’t feel right, for how long they have been working on this and not have any chat features or anti spam or other features included and the options screen is very unfriendly to the eyes, which is pretty bad for a big company like yahoo.
How long since the alpha preview? 9 months ago?..longer?
Just to add P2P voice, shocking really.
At this rate it will be out of beta when Windows 7 is released and they will have to start again.
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