14 DAY TRIAL // Despite Yahoo being all caught up in a grand advertising campaign to solidify its brand and core properties, at the end of the day, it all gets down to the actual products so it's nice to see someone is actually working at Yahoo. As Yahoo Messenger 10 is getting closer to launch, a new beta version, Messenger 10.0.0.542, has been released, fixing some bugs while also tweaking some features especially concerning the new one-on-one video call.
“This latest version addresses a couple of video call bugs, plus some improvements in messaging about how it works,” Sarah Bacon, product manager, wrote. As usual, Yahoo wants users to have their say and provide feedback on the new beta version. “We hope everyone is enjoying Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta. If you have any feedback, good or bad, please be sure to submit it through our feedback form, available under Help > Send Feedback in the product.”
Seeing how it is one of the biggest features of the upcoming Yahoo Messenger 10, the video call functionality is the main focus of this update. But there's not much use for video calls if your webcam isn't working, is there, so Yahoo fixed several issues where the webcam wasn't detected properly despite working fine in Yahoo Messenger 9 or other instant messengers and most problems of this sort should be solved.
The other changes are geared towards the user experience and aren't new feature or improvements per se. An issue that became apparent early on was the fact that users weren't aware that both participants in a conversation needed to have Messenger 10 in order to have a video call. When talking with friends using earlier versions the video call button was grayed out, leading to a lot of confusion among users, which Yahoo hopes to alleviate by adding an inline message explaining why the feature is disabled.
In the same line, users are now notified about unanswered calls as previously Messenger would just drop the call after 20 seconds without an explicit explanation to the user. A similar message has been added to notify users when the video calls are downgraded. As video calls require a solid Internet connection, if the network conditions degrade the video call is downgraded to just a voice call. Users were unsure why this happened so Yahoo added an inline message to explain the behavior.
Yahoo Messenger 10.0.0.542 Beta is available for download here.