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Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

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Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#181

Post by mattmcknight »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #154
gonehome wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat hilariously this change stops any of the text messages from reaching the google voice web app in favor of hangouts (the web app being basically it's only redeeming quality at this point) and there appears to be some weird behavior when texting people through hangouts. The webapp was the only reason I still bothered to use GV since it's felt like it's been abandoned for years now. It's frustrating how great t…

A Google product looks ground-breakingly great when it comes out, but then gets more-or-less abandoned with few subsequent releases, and slowly disintegrates? Yeah, that's what they do.

It actually wasn't a Google product initially. It was GrandCentral. I've been using it since 2006. It's still the best at what it does.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#182

Post by novaleaf »

vidarh wrote: post #125
cantbecool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…

skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#183

Post by chris_va »

nkoren wrote: post #171

Until Hangouts provide the ability to properly control one's visibility, I Will. Not. Use. Them. Full. Stop. It's somewhat amusing to see Google finally reintroducing functionality which worked perfectly well in GChat years ago. But sad when I reflect on how I now spend so much less time using the Google ecosystem, thanks to their constant dismantling (Reader), deprecation (GChat), divestment (Sketchup), and defacing…

Out of curiosity, did you happen to pay for any of those things you are complaining about?

Edit: To folks down voting... That is totally fair, this was a useless negative comment on my part.

Regardless, it seems unnecessary to avoid using a product that it might get changed.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#184

Post by tomgg »

higherpurpose wrote: post #96
cantbecool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

The Hangouts app must be built by Google's worst engineering team. It's terrible on mobile, too. The Play Store and maybe Youtube are probably slower than it, but at least those have an excuse: heavy content/graphics. What's Hangouts' excuse? A few lines of text on the screen and some tiny icons? It's a chat app...it's supposed to be fast, not super slow.

On mobile I dislike all of the kinematics. If you're composing a message and scroll up to quickly reread something, the keyboard will fly off the screen; getting it back requires tapping on a text box ...but now the keyboard is _covering_ part of the message you need to read; got to scroll back up---damn lost that keyboard again.

There's also no way to 1) hide people's avatars: I really don't need 20 visual reminders (one for each message they've sent) of who I'm chatting to; I don't even need 1! 2) hide the emoticon selector: who uses this rubbish? 3) adjust the "people you hangout with": there are 6 tiles of faces (most of them rigmarole-distributing frequent emailers who suck) and the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with"---the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with".

Google...

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#185

Post by exodust »

chris_va wrote: post #183
nkoren wrote: post #171

Until Hangouts provide the ability to properly control one's visibility, I Will. Not. Use. Them. Full. Stop. It's somewhat amusing to see Google finally reintroducing functionality which worked perfectly well in GChat years ago. But sad when I reflect on how I now spend so much less time using the Google ecosystem, thanks to their constant dismantling (Reader), deprecation (GChat), divestment (Sketchup), and defacing…

Out of curiosity, did you happen to pay for any of those things you are complaining about? Edit: To folks down voting... That is totally fair, this was a useless negative comment on my part. Regardless, it seems unnecessary to avoid using a product that it might get changed.

When you sign up to use a "free service" it doesn't mean you waive the right to complain about the quality of that service. This is especially true when you come to depend on that service, based on the provider's advertised claims of how awesome that service is.

Google of course promotes its services as awesome and excellent. That's fine, but nobody should be surprised when users evaluate those claims against their own real experiences and everyday usage of those services.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#187

Post by delackner »

DAddYE wrote: post #150
vidarh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…

I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.

I'll leave aside the meta commentary on your (unneccessary) downvote comment.

Facetime is what makes it possible for me to stay in touch with my family on the other side of the planet, and that's even if I'm sitting out in a park far from Wifi. It just works, and even if it hiccups once in a while, the reliability is high enough that you just shrug it off with the confidence that it will recover. This is on LTE with good reception.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#188

Post by michokest »

I wish Google would take a second to try their own iOS dialer in real-life scenarios:

1) Paste an international number like +34 911 111 111 from the web to Hangouts: it gets pasted as 34911111111, losing the +

2) They don't follow the standard text input element, so it's not possible to go to the beginning of the line and add a +

3) ... now you're stuck with app switching and TYPING NUMBERS IN, NUMBER BY NUMBER

There's that and then there's the horrible Hangouts video chat experience. I can't count how many hours I've wasted trying to explain other people how to join a call or share their screen before giving up and doing a voice call or skype.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#189

Post by [deleted] »

macNchz wrote: post #118
cantbecool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going. In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin. My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not bee…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#190

Post by dharma1 »

macNchz wrote: post #118
cantbecool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going. In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin. My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not bee…

Perhaps this is why:

http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe...

Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU

Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding.

They should just use h264.

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