ICQ 5 Released

[Jeff]

Jeff Hester
February 7, 2005

After briefly beta testing, America Online has officially released ICQ 5. This new version has a walkie-talkie featured called Push2Talk that uses Voice over IP (VoIP) to let you send and receive audio messages. If you're familiar with the Nextel walkie-talkie feature, it's the same idea and pretty much the same store-and-forward technology.

ICQ 5 also includes an updated interface, new skins, and improved video chat capabilities.

What's interesting is that that AOL has been slowly dropping the the "Lite" moniker from the product, and ICQ 5 has now clearly replaced ICQ Pro as the flagship ICQ product. If you still use ICQ Pro, you'll be missing out on the latest features unless you switch.

Personally, my favorite enhancement is the option to press 'Enter' to send an instant message (instead of the old "CTRL-Enter").

For more information, visit www.icq.com