Call Global App

A few months ago I needed to call a friend in Korea from my cell phone and even though I didn't have an international calling plan I figured it couldn't cost that much, so I dialed him up and we talked for about 10 minutes. Two weeks later I nearly crapped in my pants when I got the bill and saw that AT&T had charged me over $30 for that phone call! Groan. They literally charged me $3/minute. Bastards!

That's never gonna happen again, though. AT&T would love for dumbasses like myself to pay them a monthly fee for an international calling plan or get raped on every overseas call I make, but starting now I'm using Call Global App whenever I feel the need to dial another country from my cell.

You'd think there would be cheaper ways to make these calls... I'm sure a lot of people will say "just use Skype" or some virtual calling card deal... but Call Global App's rates are actually better than Skype's and waaaayyy better than AT&T's. Even if I had an international calling plan, AT&T would have charged me $.15/minute to call my friend's cell in Seoul. Skype would have charged me $.08, and Call Global's rate via their Direct Dial option was about $.07/minute.

Even better is that you get $2 of free calling when you install the app so you can take it for a test drive.

Making an international call from Call Global App is easy and, in most countries (44 of them, anyway), you can use the Direct Dial method. Just put in the number you want to call and the app will first dial some number you've never seen before and then it'll dial the loser you're calling. It takes a few seconds but it's much less of an obstacle than dialing an access number manually and inputting a secret PIN to identify your account.

If you're in a country where Direct Dial isn't available due to some government regulatory jackassery, you can use the World Call option which costs a bit more but it's still an affordable workaround - calling Korea this way was $.11/minute vs. $.07 for Direct. You put in the number you're calling and then, after a few seconds, your phone will ring! I guess what happens is Call Global is calling you at the same time they're calling the number you want to dial, and you sort of meet in the middle on what seems like an otherwise normal phone call.

Call quality was great and I could hear the guy in Korea without any issues, and he said the same about the connection on his end. The only thing that made the call a little difficult was a two second delay between us. ideasforiphone is working on fixing this, and this is what they had to say about it:

The 2 second delay you areexperiencingis because in order for us to bypass AT&T we have to redirect the calls to our phone switch, and then connects them to the person they are calling. But our developer has been diligently working to eliminate that 2 second delay, with the next update it should be drastically shortened.

Yeah, it's a pretty well-publicized fact that AT&T wants other forms of telephony to stay far, far away from the iPhone! Nice to see that companies like ideasforiphone are outsmarting the system. The two second delay was pretty noticeable on my first call through Call Global, but on a more recent conversation with that dude in Korea it seemed much less prounounced on World Call and even less noticeable on a Direct Call.

As far as the Call Global App software is concerned, overall it's pretty good but one caveat I have to make here is that the phone number format that's accepted by the app sometimes conflicts with how the iPhone wants to handle country codes when making a World Call. I only did two Direct Calls but didn't have any issues.

Anyway, when you put a different country's phone number in your contacts, the iPhone wants to format it like this:

+82 10-1234-5678

+(x) is the country code, and the hyphens are also added in automatically.

Call Global App, though, didn't like this format and I couldn't get a successful Global Call started until I removed all formatting so that the number looked like this:

821012345678

It's not a big deal if you're only calling a couple of different numbers, but it's this kind of thing that frustrates people and leads them to believe that the service just doesn't work (which it totally does).

Phone number formatting aside, the app goes pretty deep in letting you check your account balance, call history, calling rates, etc., and there's also a Favorites list for quicker dialing. Pretty nice app overall, but it uses some odd VoIP-ish terminology (um, wtf is "USA RBOC"?) that will be dumbed down in a future update, and to recharge your account you need to go to the Call Global website. The good news, however, is that once you recharge your account balance on the website it becomes available immediately on your iPhone.

If you plan on making international calls from your iPhone and can deal with the hopefully-temporary nuisance of a short voice delay, get Call Global App right now. Dialing directly from your iPhone without an overseas calling plan will bankrupt you in short order, and as far as I can tell the calling rates are very fair, plus I'm told that any money you put into recharging your account will never expire. GOOD! I hate when my money expires. Other companies perpetrate this ripoff and get away with it (even Skype), but it's not an issue here.

The app is free, and you get $2 worth of free calls to try it out for yourself, so there's really nothing to lose here unless you really enjoy bending over for AT&T. Go on, try it!

iTunes Link - Call Global App
Version 1.2
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.0.1