Someone posted a link on Twitter to try out the Google Talk Labs Edition, out of curiosity I decided to give it a shot. This lab edition was launched in April, 08. It looks a bit more cleaner than the standard edition. Some new features have been added and they have also scraped certain features that the existing one had, but hey, this is still a Google Labs edition.
New features included support for true emoticons, notifications for Orkut and Google Calendar, as well as giving you the ability to do group chats. Another welcome change is that new chat opens as a new tab in the contact window, it doesn’t pop out like it used to be. Which means a lot of desktop space is saved and the taskbar will look less congested while having multiple chat.
Two features that were missing are the voice-chat and file transfer options. I’m hoping Google will add these two features along with the video-chat features when they release the next Google Talk Version.
Give this a shot if you want to try out the new features, but for a complete replacement I suggest you wait for the next release.
You can download the Google Talk Labs Edition from here.
