Vopium Offers Limited Phone Experience

Vopium is one of a group of apps that uses a Wi-Fi connection to make and receive phone calls and text messages. It is a good concept—the more one can avoid AT&T’s spotty network, the better. Plus any calls made over the Internet don’t incur minutes against a calling plan.

AT&T’s recent lifting of its policy against using 3G for VoIP calls means that apps like Vopium can also be used on its network. VoIP apps have also proven to be a popular method to make international calls due mostly to the lower price. New users even get 15 minutes of talk time and 15 text messages when signing up for service.

Vopium allows free calls to other Vopium customers as well as users of Google Talk or Skype.

Unfortunately Vopium is not the best implementation of this set of features. While some of the call quality was ok, the app was buggy and took several tries to get it launched.

After installation Vopium asks you to create an account and then will send an SMS message with confirmation information. At least that is the theory. It took several tries during testing before this worked successfully. After finally getting Vopium setup, it’s implementation was inconsistent. Sometimes text messages would arrive, other times not. Call quality was OK for the most part. But getting calls to go through was sometimes about as reliable as AT&T’s network.

The help section is also a little difficult to follow because tapping on the help section takes you out of Vopium and onto its website in Safari. The site is not formatted for mobile so it involves lots of pinching and zooming to read the tiny text.

Vopium has a good concept going. It’s just too bad that many features are missing and others not yet working smoothly. The ability to make free calls across VoIP networks without downloading multiple apps—ie: to your friends using Google Talk or Skype—is great. But if you don’t need this functionality, you may be better off trying out a different VoIP app or waiting for the next Vopium update.