Google boosts Hangouts with SMS and GIF support, HD video, auto adjusting image quality and more
Today Google announced 18more features to its social platform and part of these new features is a bunch of updates to the instant messaging and video chat platform Google + Hangouts. The improvements include support for SMS, animated GIF’s, HD video support and location sharing.
The SMS support was promised long ago anyway, but now this update is a fact and you can use Hangouts to send and receive text messages because now the application has the SMS integration, so you won’t need to send SMS separately in the default application on your phone. Basically, this new improvement will allow you to receive and send those messages via Hangout. The bad news is there’s no information Google voice support with the message platform. Another bad part is this feature only goes to Android. Although the restrictions of iOS don’t allow this update, the other ones are coming for both Android and iOS.
The ability to share your location while chatting is also featured. With a simple button you send them your friends a map with your current coordinates.
Google also features support to animated images so you can share GIFs while you text. We all agree this was indeed necessary.
Another update boosts the video calls with auto enhance, which means Google will automatically adjust brightness and contrast for a better quality of your video, especially if you’re positioned in a dark room in front of the window, for example. That won’t be a problem for Auto Awesome. Another of its features is Eraser- it simply wipes out objects moving in a photograph as it takes sequence of photos and removes them until you get a clean image. Also all video calls go HD by default. Hangouts on Air updates will be also included with scheduling broadcasts, hosting a countdowns timer and even a trailer for the broadcast, and much more.
The new updated Hangouts is coming soon- for some of the features it will take days, for others like On Air it might take few weeks. Either way, you can start downloading them for Android HERE and for iOS HERE.
