Google Talk "Labs Edition" is an experimental build of the popular Google Talk desktop client, which borrows several features like group chat, emoticons, and tabs from the online Google Talk gadget. Labs Edition of Google Talk has been neatly integrated with Google Calendar and Orkut to provide event and scrap notification, on the other hand, some very functional features like voice chat and file transfer have been removed. AIM integration which we saw in Gmail chat is still missing. I’m beginning to wondering, if all those missed out features have anything to do with the ongoing Skype acquisition rumours.

Personally, I can’t think of many reasons to upgrade from the original Google Talk client to the "Labs Edition" because file transfer and voice chat are missing. Hopefully, they’ll come back in future versions of Google Talk. As Google OS points out, we now have four official flavors of Google Talk – original client, Google Talk Gadget, Labs Edition and Gmail Chat.

BTW, if you are a Linux or Mac OS X user, you are pretty much out of luck because Google Talk Labs Edition is Windows only, just like the preceding version.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 6:56 am.