If you’ve got family and friends sprinkled about the globe, you know that the richness of these contacts loses luster whether you can’t regularly keep in touch. Though there are excellent solutions out there–local-access calling cards, VoIP on the PC, VoIP phones from Vonage or Skype, and local-number services like Talkster (review)–they require your presence at home, new hardware, or wasting precious seconds with mile-long pin numbers or droning-on ads.

Challenging the herd is EQO (pronounced “echo”), a communication service that offers a simple, fast, and affordable solution for worldly outreach on your cell phone. Talk duration and texting are free within EQO members, and

calls cost as low as two cents per minute for everyone else, about the same rate as VoIP-to-phone calling and competitive calling cards. EQO’s worldly texting goes for ten or fifteen cents, depending on the countries of destination and departure.

User experience

The graphically-appealing app is divided into three sections, each delineated by a small icon along a top strip. Scrolling horizontally among them calls up the phone book, note inbox, or IM interface. EQO imports phone contacts into the phone book, but be careful of your management–deleting an entry from EQO plus deletes it from the phone’s database….

Original post by Jessica Dolcourt