College is the time where a lot of students travel abroad to have new experiences and to make new friends, but they usually also want to keep in touch and share their experiences with their friends and family at home.
There is an app that can help you and your friends or family communicate while abroad. Viber allows you to have free calls, texts and picture sharing with anyone that you want, anywhere you are.
You can also send video and voice messages to other Viber users. If both you and your friend or family member traveling abroad download Viber, you can do all of these things for free.
I downloaded Viber on my iPhone, and use it every week to talk to friends that are abroad. My messages have always sent quickly, and my calls have never dropped.
The messaging is set up similarly to Facebook messaging, where you can see when your message was sent, then when it was delivered, and finally when your message has been read by the recipient.
The only difference between Viber calls and regular calls is that sometimes if the conversation exceeds about 15 minutes, there starts to be a slight delay. This does not happen every time, but only occasionally.
You can choose different background images for your conversations, which makes it a little bit more interesting than just regular calling or texting.
You can also connect Viber to Facebook, to use your information and profile pictures. When you download Viber, it detects which contacts in your phone already have Viber, so that you only have to choose a name to start a message instead of inviting all of your friends to follow you.
Viber alerts you when a new contact of yours joins Viber. If someone in your contacts has Viber and contacts you, you can block their number on Viber if you don't want to talk to them.
You can share your location with friends so that they can see what part of the world you are messaging them from. Viber uses 3G or Wi-Fi, and allows you to have group messaging with up to 100 contacts. It comes with stickers that are animations of different words and pictures.
While there are other devices like Skype or Facetime that allow you to communicate with friends and family across the globe, Viber has an appearance similar to regular iPhone messaging and calls so that you don't have to adapt to a completely new way of messaging and calling.
Viber doesn't have any obnoxious advertisements.
You can use Viber on your desktop, Windows 8, iPhones, Android, Windows phone, BlackBerry, Bada and Nokia.
You can still use Viber to communicate with friends if they don't have Viber by using ViberOut, but low rates will apply. All Viber-to-Viber communication however, is free.
Instead of relying on Facebook messaging and email to communicate abroad, you can use Viber and you may not even be able to tell the difference between it and regular messages and calls.
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