Fring already hacked to allow calls over Edge and 3G

I finally got to try the official release of Fring. Well, actually I only tried the Skype feature which allows you to make free Skype-to-Skype calls or free Skype-to-Phone calls over WiFi only.

To get started, you need to have a Skype account. Registration on Skype is free. You will have to purchase talk time if you want to use the Skype-to-Phone feature though. Before I subscribed to Vonage, I used to use Skype a lot to call my family back in Europe, and I still have some credit left on my account. Sweet, I don’t even have to spend some more for the time being…

So you create your Skype account and put $10 in there to buy yourself some talk time. I couldn’t find out how long you can talk for with $10 in the US but I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere around 100 hours. If anyone has more information about that, please let us know in the comments.

Now download Fring from the App Store, launch it and register, then add the Skype service. Once you’re done doing this, you’re technically able to make calls and chat with your friends. While the Skype-to-Skype feature works very well, I had a few problems making calls to landline phones. The problem was that even though the “Fring test call” was working fine and that it showed I was connected, every time I tried to make a call to a phone in the US (or overseas), the call would get “terminated” right away.

So I went over to the Fring forum and snooped around in search of an answer to my problem. I finally read about someone who reported that even though you are connected to Fring, you may not be connected to Skype yet. Interesting. I launched Fring again, waited for a minute, dialed my home phone number, and BINGO! It rang. The key is indeed to wait a minute before making a call.

Still in Fring’s forum, I read about a patch that would allow you to make a Fring call over Edge or 3G, via Skype. I downloaded the Fring.ipa file, opened iTunes, dragged it in iTunes, synced my phone, and……. BINGO! I am now able to use Fring to make phone calls over 3G or Edge, via Skype. How cool is that?

Download This Software:

Fring.app (648.7 KiB)