New VoIP-powered ooVoo 1.5 offers two hours of free calling, lots of other features

Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern writes me to enthuse about the newest version of VoIP-delivered ooVoo’s 6-way video calling service.

A freely downloadable new edition has just been released, which offers calling to landline and mobile phones as well.

If you download this new ooVoo 1.5 between now and March 1, you will get two free outbound hours of calling to any landline or mobile phone in the U.S. and Canada from anywhere in the world. Who will you call?

I have been testing out the new version now for a few hours. The interface hasn’t changed much, though there is now a tab on the main client for making calls to regular phones. A scroll down menu lets you choose what country you would like to dial, very much like Skype, but only the United States and Canada are available for calling as of now.

Joanna has been testing ooVoo 1.5. Her verdict: on mobile, call quality is about the same as Skype but calls take a while to hook up.

Perhaps more useful is the ability to record any conversation.

"A record button has been built into the call window," Joanna writes. "If you want to record a call with another ooVoo user it will prompt them with a permission window asking if they agree to be recorded. No permission feature is available yet for recording mobile or landline phone calls.

Speaking of, here's the process of Joanna using ooVoo to participate in, and record, a video call:

You can also save your audio recording of your call to your hard drive as an .avi file.