WhatsApp voice calling works great over 3G and EDGE in India: Report

The folks at Boy Genius Report Indiagot a call late last night from Whatsapp's vice-president of business development, Neeraj Arora, through the app. "I called to check audio quality," he told them.

Voice calling -- the killer Whatsapp feature that's making Indian telecom service providers shake in their boots -- has been 'round the corner' for a long time now. But it looks like it's -- finally -- about to land on our phones.

The folks at Boy Genius Report India got a call late last night from Whatsapp's vice-president of business development, Neeraj Arora, through the app. 'I called to check audio quality,' he told them.

Boy Genius Report promptly put the calling feature of the app through its paces and discovered that it worked flawlessly on both 3G and alower EDGE networks. 'In fact, the call quality seemed better than a regular cellular call, and dare we say, almost at par with Apple's FaceTime Audio call,' they write.

The voice calling feature in Whatsapp isn't public yet. According to some reports, it only switches on for users if someone with the feature already enabled calls them through Whatsapp -- essentially an invite system.

Whatsapp is almost single-handedly responsible for disrupting SMS messages in India, where it has over 70 million monthly actively users. Can it do the same for voice calling?