Walkie Talkie Feature on SK Telecom Androids Looks Promising

I’m not really a Push-To-Talk kind of guy, but I can appreciate the purpose in having a walkie-talkie like feature on your phone. Maybe you’ve got a group of people you want to have loose connection, you’re on a road trip, you’re hiking or skiing, you could be doing pretty much anything. Let’s just say you want a walkie talkie – surely there’s an app for that?

SK Telecom – a Korean carrier – has custom created their own walkie-talkie-like offering found on their Android devices and they call it Voice Cafe. Despite the poor lighting on the screen (oops) and representative’s seeming lack of competency (she was Spanish, we’re in Barcelona, definitely not her fault), I felt the video was appropriate given the bigger picture.

Not illustrated to perfection, but you get the idea. Initially I thought this was just to be used within small groups of your contacts, but apparently you can create “chat rooms” that anyone can join. They aren’t really chat rooms because only one person can talk at a time, and I prefer the more personal use which I think serves the largest purpose.

To talk, you just hold down the screen and say your bit and it’s transmitted to everyone who is in the “room”. It seems like a helpful aid in certain situations or at its lowest common denominator, an interesting social tool to kill some time.

SK Telecom was also showing off “Voice Blog” which essentially just uses Android’s Voice-To-Text feature to translate a message and asks to which social networking sites you’d like to share. Obviously they’ll get posted in all that you choose.

What walkie-talkie like apps do YOU use and enjoy from Android Market? What do you think about Voice Cafe?