Sure, Hangouts replaces Talk and Google+ Messenger. But it completely misses the most important feature – unifying all Google messaging apps. So Hangouts works well on Chrome, iOS and Android. You can also snooze notifications for a specified amount of time (there needs to be such a system wide toggle in Android). Group Video and Voice calling are probably the standing out features, as originally seen in Google+ Hangouts.
You can of course send images and there’s plenty of emoji. When you send a new message, an ellipsis starts animating (or dancing, if you prefer that way) and shows that it’s delivered. There are lot of small transitions and animations hidden here and there. The Android app for example, lets you swipe to dismiss the conversations (like you do in Gmail). The mobile apps (Android and iOS) are very well designed and show a lot of detail in UI. On Chrome, it is available as an extension which sits in your system tray or menu bar, more like a native app. Hangouts is released for Android, Chrome and iOS. It’s kind of surprising how it took Google this long to realize this. They want Hangouts to replace all the messaging apps they’ve made till now. Well, why would Google release yet-another-instant-messaging-client? This time, they have a unique approach to it. Yesterday, during the I/O keynote, Google has released its heavily rumoured instant messaging client codenamed ‘Babel’ – called Hangouts.
