Facebook's instant messenger service WhatsApp is one of the fastest growing social networks right now. To keep up with the growing deman...
Facebook's instant messenger service WhatsApp is one of the fastest growing social networks right now. To keep up with the growing demands of its millions of users, the app frequently receives updates to add new features. Recently it announced 7 new features, also the developers has confirmed that WhatsApp is now free forever!
1. Zoom, Pop-out and Edit Videos
The new update completely changes what you can do with a video shared in WhatsApp. For starters, any video you download now has the same “pinch to zoom” mechanism that you find in photos. It’s a little difficult to pan-and-scan once you are zoomed in, but you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.
Also a new option lets you open any video in a pop-out floating window, just like playing YouTube videos in the background. This way, you can pop that video out and let it continue playing, while you browse your other WhatsApp messages.
Finally, WhatsApp also has basic video editing features like cropping or trimming the video to reduce its size and then share it.
2. Send PDFs and other popular document formats
You can now finally send PDFs to others, along with most of the other popular document formats. Everyone was waiting for this feature, finally whatsapp introduced it in its last update.
3. Share Photos from Cloud Drives
When you tap to share photos, you can simply dive into your favorite online cloud drive and add pictures from there.
WhatsApp has added support to let you send documents from cloud-based drives like Google Drive and Dropbox, along with your internal storage. It’s a small step towards making it easier to share anything.
4. Auto-Sorted Links, Docs, and Media
So, your contacts can now send you documents. Add to this fact that photos and links were already shareable, and WhatsApp has a whole lot of media flying around. How do you track it all? Our previous suggestion was to use hashtags to make search easier, but that’s made redundant by WhatsApp’s “Starred Messages”, introduced in the last big update. Thankfully, WhatsApp now auto-sorts all the links, documents, and photos or videos shared in any chat, whether a group or individual. Just open a chat, tap the three-dot options icon in the top-right corner, and select “Media”.
You’ll find three tabs for Media, Documents, and Links, which house all the relevant items shared in that chat. It’s super useful and my favorite new feature in the update.
5. Clear Chat but Keep Starred Messages
Speaking of Starred messages, their utility can’t be denied. However, those who liked to clear their chats—especially if your Android is running low on storage—also used to lose these Starred messages in doing so. The new update now lets you choose to retain these Starred messages while clearing the chat, so that the important stuff stays and the inane banter goes away. Nice and easy!
6. Control Download Settings for Data or Wi-Fi
WhatsApp is aware of how many of its users are worried about the amount of data it uses while connecting to the Internet through Edge, 3G, or 4G. A new setting allows you to minutely control this data usage. Go to Options (Three-dot icon) > Settings > Data Usage and you will find extended options to control how and when media is auto-downloaded. So when you’re using mobile data, you can set it to download only images; while roaming, no media; and when you’re on Wi-Fi, to download everything.
7. Get New Features First with WhatsApp Beta
WhatsApp has launched an official beta distribution channel on Google’s Play Store, through which you can try out new features before anyone else. Be warned that a beta app can have bugs, so we don’t advise this for everyone.
Whatsapp is introducing cool new features in almost every update now. Stay tuned for more!
