When Gmail’s free voice calling to the U.S. and Canada was launched back in August, the service was expected to be free for ‘at least the rest of the year’. The official Gmail blog has now announced that the free voice calling feature in Google’s Gmail will be extended through all of 2011.
For those who missed out on the news, voice calls from Gmail to any phone number in the U.S. or Canada were made available for free, while those to other nations were set to be billed at relatively low rates.
Making voice calls is as simple as hitting the ‘Call phone’ option sitting on top of the user’s chat list, dialing a number or entering a contact’s name. Unfortunately, this thoughtful Gmail service has yet to reach other shores.
Now the Ghost of Christmas Past has bullied the folks at Google to offer free voice calls for the whole of next year; though they’ve called it the ‘spirit of holiday giving’.