T-Mobile is trying to be known for more than mobile services (and being acquired by AT&T) and it is diving into the Voice over Internet Protocol world with the Bobsled app for Facebook. The Bobsled Facebook app offers free VoIP calls to all your friends on the world’s largest social network.
I’ve played around with the Bobsled Facebook app and it’s a quick way to make calls with your friends. You simply install the app and you can then click on the phone icon in the chat window to start a call. Call quality is pretty solid and you can even leave voice messages on other users’ walls.
“T-Mobile’s focus is to innovate to provide simple and affordable communications for customers, enabling people to stay connected wherever they are,” said Brad Duea, senior vice president, T-Mobile USA, in a prepared statement. “Bobsled by T-Mobile takes our communications services innovation to a whole new dimension, bringing simple and cost-effective connections to more than half a billion people overnight, allowing people on Facebook to more easily connect and giving voice to social networking. Our new Bobsled brand will evolve in the coming months to provide even more ways for people to connect, no matter what platform, device or mobile provider they are using.”
We’re not IntoFacebook but I thought this was an interesting bit of news because it shows T-Mobile is branching out to cover other forms of communication. All mobile calls are eventually going to be VoIP anyways, so this is an interesting test of how T-Mobile can handle this (if it stays independent).
More importantly, I’m interested in how the Facebook Bobsled app will work if it can ever be implemented in the numerous apps. We already have Facebook chat on our phones, so it would be awesome to also have VoIP on the go as well.