Yeigo was founded by three UCT students from Cape Town, South Africa. Yeigo is an innovative mobile voip application for your phone which you can use to make cheap voice calls and send text messages. In fact calls to other users with Yeigo is FREE and you can save up to 80% to non yeigo users. Incorporating some Mxit functionality you can chat to other Yeigo users for free, as well as connect to users of Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and Jabber - right from your mobile phone. You can check if your hand set is compatible here, although most are.

A reliable source informs me that they will be launching the new Yeigo website sometime this week. But the latest software release is out. I don’t have all the details of the latest version but got some rather tasty info from a internal source - Yeigo Lite is the slimmed down version of the app with some decent limited functionality with all the bells and whistles listed above together with two new functions “Holler” and call back.

Holler - send a message to a Yeigo friend who isn’t currently online, tells them to come online

Callback - calls the Yeigo server, server calls you back and connects you to the other person

You can also import friend lists and give each friend a nick name - That pretty much sums up the Lite version - Now onto the main product - Yeigo 2.1 - the latest release:

With Yeigo 2.1 you can make WiFi calls to anywhere in the world, it’s like Skype on your phone but uses 90% less bandwidth (which makes it a chunk cheaper) and has a great deal less lag. To make calls to non Yeigo users you need to buy Yeigo credits just like Skype although its cheaper. You can call anyone anywhere in the world all you need is the credits - One of the Yeigo staff members called a friend in Dublin, Ireland for five minutes and cost him a measly $1.30. Now if your used to Telscum’s global call rates thats pretty impressive!

Some of the other new features are status updates -

Now you can tell the world what you’re up to and see what you’re friends are doing too, right from your mobile phone. You’re status is important - Yeigo replicates it across all your IM accounts while you’re logged in to Yeigo.

Set your presence - See who’s online, away or busy and let others know if you’re up for a chat or busy doing something amazing with all the money you’re saving.

Full screen chat - Got lots to say? Spell it out in full-screen chat mode.

Tab chat - Talking to lots of people at once? No problem, YeigoLITE let’s you jump between your active full-screen chats so you can multi-task.

UPDATE - The latest version has been released, you can go grab it here.

Heres some screen shots of the latest version -

More screen shots after the jump -

How does Yeigo work graph -

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