Once again, I’m waiting a ridiculous amount of time for a friend’s video to upload in Google Chat so I can watch it. If you’re hoping to do more with it, you should look elsewhere for a more thoughtfully designed, and scalable, communication method. If you’re only using the phone app and only for chatting with a limited number of friends socially, which is clearly the use case they have decided to laser focus on, you’ll be fine with it. The conversations are spaced relatively far apart and take up way too much screen real estate. The alphabetical sorting of conversations means hunting down the person you were just talking to. It’s completely unwieldy with more than 20 active conversations. I used Hangouts and now use Chat in a professional environment, for more casual short form comms, and it’s clear after 6 weeks of heavy use that Chat wasn’t designed for anything more than light usage. Google Chat is at its best on the mobile app, but if you’re using it regularly, across mobile and in the desktop chrome extension, you’ll quickly see the questionable choices made by the developers. Unfortunately, that’s about where the improvements end. That’s really nice and a feature we were hoping for coming from Hangouts. Maybe Google is still ironing out the kinks, but we expected better.Google Chat added the ability to have rooms where specific topic threads can be created. Plus, you can only chat with friends who also use Hangouts. However, the app's technical glitches and awful video quality need serious improvement. We like that Google Hangouts offers video chat and that you can chat with friends on iOS or Android devices. Google Hangouts is a free download, and both messaging and video chats are free. Motions were jagged, and the entire app frequently crashed when we tried to video chat. Worse, our video call failed every few seconds and reverted back to our caller's profile photo until the video could relaunch. In addition, audio was extremely delayed. Even over Wi-Fi, quality was awful, with grainy, fuzzy and washed-out video. For example, we tried to send a message to our mom, who doesn't use Gmail, and Hangouts wouldn't let us do it. But there's a caveat: You can only chat with those who also use Hangouts. Also, if you don't want to be disturbed, you can set Hangouts to "snooze."Ĭlick to EnlargeMessaging within Google Hangouts was a breeze. Once you get an alert for a hangout on your phone, that alert won't be sent to your notebook, or any other device. Google is also smart about sending notifications. Other features include the ability to add hundreds of emoji, view call history for chat and video, and see collections of photos from your hangouts. When snapping a picture, you can preview the image, and if it looks good, tap the checkmark to immediately send. The app also lets you send pictures, either by choosing a photo from the camera roll or by taking a photo from within the app itself. You can video chat with up to 10 friends. Hangouts is the only messaging app we've reviewed that features video chat. More than 30 people exceeds WhatsApp's cap of 30, but we wonder if Google can outdo Facebook Messenger's limit of 250. However, the program doesn't specify exactly how many people you can include in a group chat. We tried messaging up to 36 of our friends on Hangouts and had no problems. Click to EnlargeOne of the main appeals of Hangouts is group chat.
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