BBM Voice for 5.0 OS is a fight back too late for BlackBerry

Rating: Seems a tad user unfriendly, too

First the good news. Recently [March 12th 2013], BlackBerry announced that there was a brand spanking new version (7.0.1) of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) which features a new facility called BBM Voice. This feature provides voice chatting over a Wi-fi connection and will work now with BlackBerry smartphones running the BlackBerry OS version 5.0. What this effectively does is to put BlackBerry smartphones in direct competition with the likes of Skype. Don’t forget that Skype only ever produced an official Skype client for BlackBerries on the Sprint network. So it is BlackBerry fighting back. In our humble opinion, it is too little too late.

The reason we say this is – for our small straw poll of existing BlackBerry users in the UK, they simply don’t understand what BBM Voice is and why they should install it.

The BlackBerry owners we spoke to had seen an automated message come through via BBM informing them of the new update and the BBM Voice facility.

Firstly, we had to explain to them what BBM Voice did – in effect, it offers free voice calls over Wi-fi rather than the cellular network.

One owner pointed out that she always had hundreds of unused voice minutes – so why should she bother?

The answer is simple. When you are ‘roaming’ (travelling abroad), the last thing you want to do is to start making and receiving expensive calls.

However, if you can get a cheap or free Wi-fi connexion then you can easily start speaking to your BBM mates back home without incurring roaming charges.

Actually, BBM Voice was originally launched back in December 2012 for BlackBerry smartphones running the BlackBerry 6 OS and higher. It’s just that BlackBerry 5.0 devices can now join in.

BlackBerry claims that to date, over 50 million BBM Voice calls have been made. So somebody obviously has worked out to use it.

Now, obviously if you want to take advantage of BBM Voice you are going to have to download it from the all-singing, all-dancing BlackBerry World storefront here.

We found that to do so, most users we approached first of all needed to install the very latest version of the BlackBerry App World client.

Having done that, it was then possible to download the new BBM version 7 client; install it and then reboot.

What the smartphone supplier didn’t make all that clear is that you also need the BlackBerry ID (BBID) facility installed for BBM Voice but this can be set up when upgrading BBM.

By about now, you’ve jumped through three hoops. The next step is to identify which of your BBM mates have got version 7 and BBM Voice installed and are ready to accept a call because they have a live Wi-fi connexion.

This last hoop is what let GoMo News down because – in order to test the facility, both handsets were connected to the same Wi-fi hotspot and – maybe understandably, one of us was always showing as ‘unavailable.

In our humble opinion this is exactly the sort of thing that RIM should have introduced ages ago. It enables Blackberry users to finally be on par with rival smartphones which can run apps such as Truphone or Skype to make free Wi-fi calls.

It’s good news that virtually the entire BlackBerry global community will be able to use BBM Voice.

And the company appears to acknowledge that will help it remain competitive in emerging markets, But why has it taken so long?

* Footnote: For a nasty moment we thought that Viber worked on BlackBerry 5.0 handsets. It does but it uses BBM to send messages to your Viber mates. You can’t chat with them.