Google Mail Calling - See You Soon

Google Mail now has calling. For years Google had click to call tied to phone numbers on Google Maps. They've had Google Voice and picked up Gizmo.

The media world has lit up over the fact that now from inside GMAIL you can make a phone call by clicking a button and up pops a dialing window. You can call away for free or for what Google feels are very low prices.

The installation is rather simple. And calls connect quickly. The sound quality is very good, likely based on the GIPS codecs. But the real sleeping giant inside the new offering isn't the free calling. It's video. And it becomes big and meaningful when you can call from your Google account to any Android device on a high speed network, and voila, Google has its own kind of "FaceTime" (and has come out before Skype) at getting to the mobile world. Next will be when Google Video becomes compatible and interoperable with FaceTime. Then video calling becomes, well, like calling.