Entered CNET Catalog: 06/21/2006
SKU: SERVYAHOOMESSENGERVOICE8BETA
Manufacturer: Yahoo! Inc.
Product summary
The good: Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 offers paid outbound and inbound telephone calls in addition to free voice and video chat; free avatars; creative third-party plug-ins; allows you to chat with Windows Live users.
The bad: Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 lacks the synchronized file sharing of Windows Live Messenger; ads appear within interface.
The bottom line: While Windows Live Messenger offers better file sharing and video chatting, Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 stands out for its Net telephone service, photo sharing, novelty plug-ins, and embedded search.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 06/20/2006
Plus, you can add contacts outside of the Yahoo network and chat via text with users of Windows Live or MSN Messenger. We clicked the Add A Contact link within Yahoo Messenger and added a Windows Live friend to our contact list as easily as adding a Yahoo pal. To chat with users of other messaging brands in the past, you'd have to use an IM tool such as Trillian.
This download took about a minute via broadband in our tests. During installation, the default options will place a Messenger icon on your desktop and set Yahoo as your default search engine, so make sure to unclick those choices if you don't want these changes. You'll have to go a step further and pick Custom Install if you want to reject the Yahoo browser Toolbar. We're pretty annoyed that Yahoo, along with plenty of other vendors, foists such add-ons upon you by default. Without those extras, the download takes up about 9MB on your hard drive.
Once installed, the layout of Messenger doesn't depart much from its predecessor's. We find the layout slightly more intuitive than that of its rival Windows Live Messenger. Yahoo Messenger displays drop-down menus along the top and bottom tabs for the company's other properties, such as Yahoo Music and 360 blogs. It also offers two search fields: one to look up contacts, the other for Internet queries. We found the animated bottom panel of ads distracting and annoying, and we wished we could hide it.
You can liven up your chat window by applying your own color scheme, though Windows Live Messenger offers more free options here. We're not a fan of Yahoo's IMvironments, which let you brandish the chat interface's background with an ad for cars, cartoons, movies, and even beer. At least Microsoft provides noncommercial background themes. But Yahoo lets you build a free avatar, which is a paid extra within Windows Live Messenger.
Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 has separate search bars that let you find contacts and look up anything at Yahoo Search. You and your chat buddy can view the same Internet search results at once, which could be helpful, say, if you're trying to catch an 8 p.m. movie together. And when you highlight and roll over text within a message, Yahoo's LiveWords engine pops up related search results. You can also format text, send emoticons and animated winks and nudges, play games with other users, and send SMS messages to and from a mobile phone.
Additionally, Yahoo has opened Messenger's code to developers so that savvy users can add new functions to the IM tool. The current 180 plug-ins--available here--allow you to track eBay auctions within Messenger 8, share Yahoo Maps and Calendars with chat buddies, and listen to free music with the Launchcast service. As a nod to Yahoo's fan base on Wall Street, the updated Yahoo Finance plug-in allows you to view company stock prices and recommend picks to friends. Many of the plug-ins are perfect for young users to share--especially the new Yahoo Avatar Space. With this add-on, your avatar will be able to interact with your buddy's avatar, each alter ego reacting to the words you both type. Mention love, and your avatar's heart will visibly throb; flowers may bloom at their mere mention; and you might even call up an angel. Neat third-party tools include the Eazibo flowchart and photo-sharing tool for sharing custom pictures with pals.
Yahoo's drag-and-drop photo sharing is a breeze for buddies who want to show off their latest snapshots. Once a buddy accepts your sharing invitation, you can drop a picture or a bunch of images into the chat window, then use the mouse as a pointer to call attention to a specific image. You can view larger pictures if they're already uploaded to a Yahoo Photos account and save a friend's photos to your hard drive.
You can also drop up to 10 files of 10MB each within Yahoo's IM window, which prompts your pal to save the documents onto a hard drive. However, we prefer the approach of Windows Live Messenger, which opens a file sharing folder that both users can change in real time and includes an upfront scanning and cleaning system for potential security threats.
Windows Live Messenger is the champ at full-screen, 640x480 video chatting, but we found the quality of free voice chats to be equally clear within Yahoo Messenger. However, Yahoo Messenger 8 is the better choice for travelers or people who want to make reasonably priced phone calls to contacts around the globe. Voicemail is included. Through AT&T Yahoo Voice, you can make calls within the United States for up to 2 cents per minute. It costs between a penny and 95 cents per minute to call people in a few dozen countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Pay $2.49 or more per month for your own phone number to receive calls. By contrast, Windows Live Messenger costs 1.9 cents per minute for U.S. calls and up to a dollar to reach numbers abroad but lacks inbound calling options. We found Yahoo's setup for PC-to-phone and phone-to-PC calling to be friendly enough that VoIP newbies might give it a try. Yahoo also offers compatible handsets.
Yahoo provides a searchable and detailed online knowledge base, a tutorial for getting started, as well as user forums. However, we wish that Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 offered e-mail assistance like Windows Live does.
If you don't need the graphic goodies of Yahoo Messenger and its ilk, then we recommend the bare-bones Google Talk. Overall, if you don't mind an IM client that's heavy on the smiley faces but still rich in features, we recommend Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8 for its ease of use, photo sharing, integrated search, and voice-calling options.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15out of 15 user reviews
Full of tech, billing and cust. serv. deficiencies.
Pros: Cheap (1 penny/minute domestic) long distance and free toll free calls
Cons: Terrible billing department which has 1) Denied a perfectly clean visa card 2) Then accepted payment and billed for use of 2 weeks 3) Cancelled service due to "Suspected Fraudulent Activity" also the "Phone-in" number constantly keeps dissappearing
out of 15 user reviews
Software from hell
Pros: You can chat for free
Cons: Buggy software. Horrible design flaws. Servers are overloaded.
out of 15 user reviews
The phone out is a fraud. I would rate it 0 if available.
Pros: Not much worth mentioning
Cons: Almost everything about it
out of 15 user reviews
Very disappointed with the quality
Pros: nice interface
Cons: constantly crashing
out of 15 user reviews
Yahoo! messenger 8.0 is not perfect but it is GREAT.
Pros: It has improvements on all fronts, Voice, pluggins, Interop with MSN and more.
Cons: Yahoo! Messenger Video certainly needs improvement.
Yahoo! Joined the voice bandwagon late but had done well in catching up to Skype. Overall I am very impressed. One thing to keep in mind is that this product caters to a wide audience and as a result may not please everyone. However it is certainly an improvement over the past. Pluggins are innovative and impressive, we all should remember this is only the version 1.0 of plugins and I hope there will be more down the road.
out of 15 user reviews
Why do Cnet Reviewers ignore it's horrendous flaws?!
Pros: Features, Webcamming(When it works)
Cons: Crashing, Crashing numerous PCs, freezing constantly
out of 15 user reviews
don't up grade
Pros: looks neet
Cons: it makes you computer run slow
it makes you computer run slow, the "plugin" are kind of lame. and if you lesion to Launch cast it will crach all the time.
out of 15 user reviews
Voice issues
Pros: Users need not upgrade YIM 7.5
Cons: Calling & conference Issues
Similarly on a Conference mode the audio goes kaput within 10 minutes.
out of 15 user reviews
YM is problematic
Pros: Good sound quality
Cons: Servers overload, video seriously flawed
Cute add-ins for IM-ing but if you want voice/video, it is a no-go.
out of 15 user reviews
Haste Makes Waste
Pros: The plugins feature has a lot of potential for customization, which is the same path taken by programs like Firefox and Opera
Cons: This version is one of the buggiest yet
This version crashes a LOT sometimes when you just do routine things like changing your status message. It can't be my setup since things were working just fine before I upgraded to this version. It's even difficult to just connect to the YM network. Unlike previous versions, if the connection fails it does not automatically attempt to connect again. Thus, unless you've selected the Automatically Connects on Startup option, prepare yourself to constantly click sign in over and over again.
The plugins feature does have potential although the options are severely limited thus far and I find them to simply eat up too much bandwidth to be practical, thus I turned them all off entirely.
Lastly, there's that annoying ad banner at the bottom of the screen. Thankfully, you can remove it by following the instructions here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/05/no-more-ads-in-yahoo-messenger.html
out of 15 user reviews
Not enough time or thought put into it, older version better
Pros: Has many good features that I use like the IMvironments and eMoticons and avatars, chat access, etc.
Cons: Can be very slow, features don't always work, crashes often, server is often "too busy" to use features such as chat and webcam
out of 15 user reviews
it is awful!!!!!!1
Pros: nooooooooooooooooo
Cons: nooooooooooooooooo
with every so-called new and improved version of yahoo messenger, yahoo messenger gets worse.. it gets slower, it crashes, it's less interesting... so what if it has phone in and phone out? do you actualy think anyone will use them? not us... maybe companies but i doubt that sinceriley as well..
the older versions were much better.....i'm sorry to say this but yahoo fluckned the 8 beta test.. sorry for you guys..
out of 15 user reviews
8.0 Beta is better than the 7.5 version!
Pros: You get to add some items in the Plug-ins section and get around fairly easy as in the original version; your contacts are still intact during the upgrade as well as your address book
Cons: Considerable amount of time and patience needed to upgrade to Beta 8.0 from the original version
out of 15 user reviews
Every new version gets worse for yahoo
Pros: nothing worth mentioning
Cons: lack of icons that were there before, ads in messenger window
out of 15 user reviews
It starts all again from login if u change the status
Pros: Very goodm
Cons: crashes the product
Kalpesh
