[scrame]

<b>Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell</b>

My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.

[kibwen]

I should have clarified: best-in-class for what my friends and I need, which is essentially simultaneous multi-user voice chat that doesn't require installing an external program (if they have Chrome, it doesn't require installing anything at all), works on all platforms, doesn't mandate a laborious microphone calibration on first use, and has pretty decent echo cancellation. We were just looking to replace Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble, rather than e.g. looking for a replacement for Skype. It's been invaluable as a permanent place for our geographically-distributed friend group to idly loiter and connect to whenever anyone has a free moment.

[davidgerard]

"doesn't require installing an external program"

I had to install a .deb to use it in Firefox on Linux.

[alttab]

I use hangouts on my note 2 and it works great. I don't run a lot of gadgets on my phone though.

I think hangouts killer feature is in the browser.