SMARTPHONES are the soul of today’s living. Am I not right? Because, it lets you to do many things which are not possible to do with the normal phone. Moreover, many applications that come with the smartphones just change your life.

You’ve heard of texting, right? Billions of people use text messages. And you’ve heard of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), the free system for users of BlackBerry phones, where, unlike texts, sending or receiving messages cost nothing, because it’s done as data that you have already paid for in your contract.

OK. But have you ever heard of WhatsApp? If you’re under 30, the answer is almost certainly ‘Yes’. But just in case you haven’t, it is a cross-platform mobile messaging ‘app’ that allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS, and it has an estimated 300 million users worldwide. That’s more than twice as many as BBM, and it has the mobile operators increasingly worried, because it works like BBM – over data – but on any phone that can run the ‘app’, including phones running Android, Windows Phone, Nokia’s Symbian and S40, BlackBerry OS and Apple’s iOS. To communicate with someone, you both have to have WhatsApp installed. (It will recognise your contacts that have it from their phone number).

WhatsApp lets you send texts for free. Yes! 100% free! You will never be charged for a text sent through WhatsApp. This is because WhatsApp sends messages through an Internet data connection.
WhatsApp was started in 2009 by two Yahoo! Veterans, Jan Koum and Brian Acton; is based in Santa Clara, California; and presently handles more than 10 billion messages per day. And, it’s also one of the most popular paid-for ‘apps’ on any platform. Why a paid ‘app’ (You have to buy it on the iPhone, but it’s free for the first year on other platforms) rather than totally free? As the founders recently explained via post on the company’s blog: “These days, companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.” WhatsApp is not an ad; it’s something that would save people money and make their lives better in a small way.

WhatsApp is a potential market of many hundreds of millions of users, and although the company hasn’t released any formal numbers, it’s safe to say that it’s already really big, and likely to become even more gigantic in the coming years.

Do you feel we in Guyana are facing a period of accelerating erosion of SMS volumes? Even though WhatsApp is such a fresh phenomenon, it has already played a major role in pushing some countries’ SMS volume into an annual 28-30% decline. Can you believe this! I was travelling in a public bus from Vreed-en-hoop to Cornelia Ida early last week, and it was quite evident that the person sitting next to me was texting away on WhatsApp. I was so mad, that I asked the individual to “ease up,” a bit. Every 30 seconds, ‘Bling’ ‘Bling’, ‘Bling’, ‘Bling’. It was enough to drive me crazy! Anyways, it so happened that the individual was so caught up in the WhatsApp conversation, that they either forgot or didn’t realise they had reached their destination, and so went past it by almost three miles. Are we that bad?
One of the disadvantages of WhatsApp is that some people are asking how big their data bundle must be; but it all depends on your usage of WhatsApp. If you are going to send huge amounts of video or MP3 files to your friends, then you will require a bigger bundle. But for normal text messaging, not much is used.

The other disadvantage is that your contacts need WhatsApp installed much like Skype. You can send WhatsApp Messages to friends if they don’t have the ‘app’ installed themselves.

Let’s talk about the positive side now. Group chat: Group-chat is one of the most popular features of WhatsApp. Users can talk to up to ten of their friends at a single time. Whether you’re planning a night out on the town, or just connecting with a group of your buddies, the group-chat feature is popular and unique.
Find friends automatically: If any of your friends are already using WhatsApp, you’ll know. After asking for your permission, WhatsApp will scan your phone, looking for contacts. WhatsApp is connected to your phone number, which means finding your friends is as easy as possible.
See when your friends have read your messages: BlackBerry OS, in spite of all its faults, featured one of the most popular chat applications in recent years: BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). One of the innovative features in BBM was the ability to see when your messages had been sent, read, and delivered. Every time you sent a message to a friend, a small letter would pop up beside that message. The letter ‘D’ would indicate that the message had been delivered, while an ‘R’ would indicate the message had been read. WhatsApp uses the same system.
WhatsApp can be downloaded for all of the following types of phones:

-iPhone
-BlackBerry
-Android
-Windows Phone
-Symbian

To download WhatsApp for any type of phone, visit the official WhatsApp website.
After downloading and installing the ‘app’, users can run it once, in order to find friends who are WhatsApp contacts. WhatsApp will scan through your contact list to determine if anybody else is a WhatsApp user. With millions of people already signed up for WhatsApp, you shouldn’t have trouble finding at least a few friends to chat with. So, next time you chat, start your conversation with: “WhatsApp-ning!”