Preview: Voice Calls in WhatsApp for Android

Free calls through WhatsApp are about to arrive; that’s a fact.

Here we show you how your smartphone will look with this functionality, according to leaked images.

As you can see, the upper part of the application, recently acquired by Facebook, will show the typical image of a handset; when it is clicked, this takes us to a calling screen, quite similar to that common on the Android device OS.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngqe2qkDuuY

From the visual and from the technological point of view this is not a unique innovation; in fact, Line and other instant messaging services already provide support for calls via VoIP. Thus, WhatsApp is simply getting up-to-date in offering calls which could be carried out between users of the service via Wi-Fi, or using the smartphone’s data connection.

As we said, this is no novelty, but the fact that this type of option comes for the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (last week, the company announced that it had achieved a new record with 64 billion messages sent via its network in a single day) can make it become “the new way to talk over the phone”.

Surely, phone operators in countries in which the use of WhatsApp is very common will resent their loss in income…

WhatsApp had announced that it would soon offer voice calls for Android in the Mobile World Congress, last month (February) in Barcelona. Now that the functionality becomes visible, we are awaiting when it will be included in the world’s most-used messaging service.