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EQO is a US-based mobile VoIP and IM service offering a complete portfolio of integrated communication services to their users from their mobile phone.

I reviewed many mobile VoIP services in this blog so it’s my fault that I still haven’t had the opportunity to try EQO that, on the contrary, received a lot of praises by many important online magazines and blogs.

What you can do with EQO? After installing it on you mobile phone (it’s a J2ME application) you can:

- make international and local calls to landline and mobile phones
- make FREE calls to other EQO users
- chat with your friends and contacts using AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ and MSN
- send cheap messages to other mobile phones

The installation is easy, like other similar services you receive a SMS through which you can download the application on your mobile phone. I’ve installed it on my Nokia N95.

The user interface is not that bad, even if I found it not that easy to use and, even worse, really slow on my phone. Typing a number is painful as well as waiting for a prompt response from the menu items.

According to EQO’s website, the phonebook is the hearth of EQO. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to import my phone’s address book and I’m neither sure if this feature is available. If not, this is a thumb down of course , since I cannot imagine to add all my contacts again!

EQO offers you € 2,00 to try the service out. I’ve tried to make a phone call to my office’s phone and I’ve realized that, unlike services like Fring, it’s not a “pure VOIP” service (that is, in a nutshell, it doesn’t use the data connection of your phone to make phone calls).

As soon as I dialed the number, my mobile phone popped up a message asking me if I wanted to make a phone call. The number showed is not that one I dialed, but it seems to be a local gateway. I can understand this, but a normal user could be confused by that behavior and this can be a “usage killer” (that is, users give up).

Anyway, I tried to make that call several times but only one I finally heard my phone ringing. Unfortunately I couldn’t take the call because it wasn’t connected properly I’ll give it another try later…

In conclusion, I can say that this service is still far to compete with other services like Fring or Nimbuzz both in terms of user experience, features and quality. Even Yeigo, that is the newest I tried a few weeks ago, offers a better user experience.

I’ve not compared the phone rates yet, since even if they would offer this service completely for free, the usage of this application has been so frustrating for me that I give up anyway. However, rates seem comparable to those I have with my current data mobile plan.

I look forward to getting some feedbacks from the EQO’s guys in order to help me to try this service again in the future.

UPDATE: Chris Richardson, EQO’s Solution Architect, immediately contacted me in order to look into the problems above and sort them out. I’ll post an update pretty soon.

eqo, luca filigheddu, mobile voip