Follow the Olympics Right from Beijing on Your Cell Phone with Fring

We have already covered Fring on Profy before but for those of you who are not familiar with this interesting and very promising mobile service, I’ll start with a short introduction here. In short, Fring is a platform for cellular devices that enables users (they are called Fringers here) to access their existing accounts with Skype, MSN Messenger, GTalk, ICQ, and our beloved Twitter (with other services in the works, I believe) right from their handsets whenever they need or want to. What’s more, the users can even make absolutely free calls to their friends using various supported VoIP services. But obviously data plan determines what they will pay for such calls unless they use WiFi only.

Fring works on UIQ, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices and the company has also recently added support of iPhone as well. Earlier this summer Fring opened API for developers to submit the add-ons and apps for the platform to broaden the initial feature set. This resulted in a number of both useful and pure entertainment applications added to the Fring catalog in a matter of weeks.

Today Fring is launching a new service for all the Fringsters to enjoy - every mobile user can now track news from the Olympics right on their handhelds with the help of Fring users who chose to report on the Olympics from China for the rest of us to enjoy. This is done with a special add-on (Olympics fringAdd-on they call it) that has been developed for this purpose.

Back in June the guys at Fring called for volunteers who were already booked to go to China for the Games and offered their users free 3G mobile phones to report on the events at the Games. As a result Fring recruited a total of 6 volunteers who starting from today will post their text updates and images regularly for all the fringsters to follow, even when they can’t sit in front of their TVs watching Olympics.

Fring website already features the countdown to the opening ceremony so if you are not going to Beijing to watch the games yourself and are still looking for more ways to follow the news from the Olympics, this latest idea from fring may be what you need for when you are on the go.