Viber, the App We Use To Save Money on Roaming
Andrei travels a lot with his job in Europe (mainly). He is away 4-6 days/week, and until roaming will be free (there was a news saying roaming will be free in Europe starting July 2014), if we want to talk to each other and not pay too much, we have to find alternative solutions. And we discovered and used Viber for a while now and are pretty satisfied with it.
In fact, as we talk to some of our friends who also travel (for leisure or pleasure), we discover many of them use Viber (and may I add this is NOT a paid post, it is a recommendation following a satisfying experience).
OK, we admit: we both have Google talk installed on our computer (and we tried to use it especially for video calls – for my kid to see his father, for Andrei to see us all, including our beautiful dog. But the quality of the internet isn’t great all over the world therefore sometimes it is truly impossible to have such video calls (that was the case when Andrei was in South Africa). I also have Skype as I have some clients on marketing, public relations and social media accounts management I’m keeping in touch with using it.
Viber allows you to have more than 2 participants in the same call, and you can send messages (delivered via this platform, of course), from any country and any device. They have a version for Windows, Android, iOS, Nokia, Blackberry, etc. so virtually everyone can use it.
You need a connection to the internet (but then again many hotels offer free wi-fi and there are many other places you can have such a connection) and to make an account (easily, just takes 1 minute or so). I have the app installed on my smartphone (a Samsung Galaxy SII Plus) and I am pretty happy with it.
Of course there will always be moments when you’ll need to make a call the old fashion way – no matter the cost. We too have such discussions often. But when you can save some money, why not take advantage of that, especially when it is not the company that’s paying the bill for that number, but yourself?
What app are you using for your calls when you are travelling in order to save money?
