VoIP company Fring has found yet another way to compete with Skype. Fring, which specializes in mobile VoIP-plus-chat apps, today announced FringOut, a calling service that lets you use your Fring app to place outbound calls to non-Fring users on their landline or mobile phones.

While Fring boasts calls starting at 1 cent per minute (Euros), we noticed a couple of caveats after wading through Fring's calling rates. Most FringOut calls cost significantly more than one cent per minute in any currency, and costs can spike for a number of reasons. Calls to mobile phone typically cost much more than calls to home phones. Service into a metropolitan area is usually cheaper than calls to remote outposts. Fring also organizes calling rate fluctuations by prefix.

Even our chart below, which samples a handful of VoIP calling rates across Fring, Skype, and Google Voice looks tangled. This is partly the nature of the beast.

Calling rates in U.S. cents per minute
	FringOut	SkypeOut	Google Voice
China	1.1	2.3	2
Germany	1.1-19.9	5.5-25.3	2-42
India	1.4	9.2	6 (landline and mobile)
Mexico	1.6	2.3-33.6	2-19
U.K.	0.7-37.4	2.3 (landline), 25.9 (mobile)	2 (landline), 18 (mobile)

You'll see that due to the range of charges, there's no clear-cut cost leader. Instead, each of the three services may offer a better price for a handful of countries than the others.

If you've got a Nokia S60 phone running on Symbian, you can use FringOut now. It will also be available on iPhone and Android smartphones in the future. You'll need to buy credit for FringOut before you can begin using the service.

DoubleTwist is at its core a free music jukebox that offers content syncing to a variety of portable devices, including the BlackBerry, the PSP, and the iPod, as well as pretty much anything that can mount in Universal Mass Storage mode. One of the main draws of the program is that it can take your iTunes library and sync it to a variety of non-iPod players, an important feature for anyone who has ditched the ubiquitous device in favor of a music phone or other MP3 player.

In addition to acting as a music management app that's compatible with a variety of devices, the jukebox offers built-in support for Amazon MP3 Store purchases, which is in line with the company's goal to offer consumers choice when it comes to digital music management. Plus, the service includes a podcast aggregator for easily finding and subscribing to a variety of popular spoken word content. More recently, DoubleTwist added an Android Market, which lets you browse apps and then use a barcode scanner to download them via your phone's camera. All of these features work incredibly well, though our praise for performance ends there.

Read the full DoubleTwist review

Two months ago, Firefox debuted Firefox Home, a companion app for iPhone that syncs open browser tabs, browsing history, and passwords across the mobile phone and Web.

Today, an update to Firefox Home for iPhone adds three small but notable enhancements. First, the update tweaks the app's search bar so it now seeks out a URL that you've never visited before from the app. Previously, you had to browse sites that you've visited before from the desktop browser.

The second addition makes Firefox Home operate in 15 languages, including Chinese, Spanish, and French. The final notable change will let advanced users connect the app to their custom Firefox Sync servers.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Meebo brings a new instant messaging entrant to BlackBerry today, in the form of a beta release of Meebo for BlackBerry (download). The Web-based IM service hopes to net more users with this app, in addition to those it picked up when Meebo released its iPhone and Android apps.

For the most part, Meebo for BlackBerry beta worked and looked as expected in our tests on a Bold 9700. The app makes use of two tabs to respectively manage your buddy list and contacts. The Menu is home to settings and tools, like logging on to one of your chat accounts. Unfortunately, we didn't find managing those accounts--like changing your password--doable from the mobile app.

Among the features in Meebo for BlackBerry are a search bar to quickly surface contacts, archived chat history, and syncing to Meebo.com, so you can switch between Web and BlackBerry versions. Indeed, if you're logged onto both Meebo.com and the app, chats will show up simultaneously. You can insert emoticons only through the Menu bar, and a lack of file- and photo-transferring functionality makes Meebo's BlackBerry app best suited for speedy text chats.

If you've tried Meebo for BlackBerry, let us know what you think.

Looking to lose weight? Lower your cholesterol? Control your diabetes? Prevent cancer? These are among the proven benefits of a vegan diet--meaning one free of all animal products (meat, dairy, etc.).

OK, but how do you get started? Without your morning cereal, lunchtime Quarter Pounder, and the like, what are you supposed to eat?

Enter 21-Day Vegan Kickstart, a free app that provides three weeks' worth of meals, complete with recipes. Why three weeks? According to experts, that's enough time to drop a few pounds, lower your blood sugar, and just generally start feeling better. And, hey, anybody can manage 21 days, right? At the end, it's up to you to decide if you want to continue.

The app couldn't be easier to navigate. Each day starts with a brief tip on healthy eating, followed by recipes for that day's breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack. The recipes include checkboxes next to each ingredient, so you can check off items as you toss them in your grocery cart.

If there's a recipe you especially like, tap the star icon to add it to your bookmarks for easy reference. There's also a search option and a list view for all the recipes.

One small point of confusion: the app appears to give you only the first seven days' worth of recipes. But, as explained in the help screen, more will appear on the eighth day (and again on the 15th).

Only a smattering of the dishes have accompanying photos; a few more would be nice. Also, a kale recipe on the very first day? Not a best-foot-forward approach. Newcomers need time to acclimate to that evil green! (I'm kidding. Most of the recipes are excellent. But kale? I just can't choke that stuff down.)

The 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program was developed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which is headed by renowned health advocate Neal Barnard, M.D. Here's a bit more about the program:

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas