One benefit of doing this job is you tend to have a bird's eye view of the mobile landscape. Specifically I mean you tend to know the history of every bit of software and hardware, unlike the casual consumer.
Case in point is WhatsApp and voice calling. New articles are making their way around the internet noting WhatsApp's voice calling feature as coming to Windows Phone "soon" and "in the works".
There is no doubt that this is the case. After all, WhatsApp did announce that Windows Phone would get the feature. The thing is they announced it back in February, 2014.
Of course, you may point to the recent development of 'translation strings' mentioning 'Hang up, Incoming call, Outgoing call' and such. Sure, we also heard that back in April, 2014 when requests for those very translations were put out for Hindi. Considering WhatsApp was aiming for a Spring 2014 release of this new VOIP feature, everyone thought we were on the cusp of release. Whoops.
WhatsOld is WhatsNew again
So here we are in April, 2015 and this voice calling feature is still "coming soon" and "in the works". I want to be clear that I do not doubt that voice calling is coming to Windows Phone. There is nothing suggesting that plans on this have changed since February, 2014.
This point though brings me back though to my opening line: some of you likely do not recall the February, 2014 WhatsApp proclamation about this coming to Windows Phone. So for you, this is new news. Fair enough.
Irrespective, until bits of this feature actually start appearing in the private beta of WhatsApp (last updated on March 27), I just do not see the big deal just yet. We have heard "coming soon" for a long time now, as even iOS users do not yet have this voice calling feature (and it just launched on Android in wide release only a few days ago).
So, let's wait until we see something substantive first before getting too excited.
