Mentions are now Live on WhatsApp 2.16.272 Beta Update, Video Calling Coming Soon

After Twitter, Facebook came with the mentions in September 2009. Later most of the social networking sites including LinkedIn also used mentions to make the interactions simple and convenient. Today, WhatsApp Messenger also joins the list; the mentions are now live with the recent Android beta update. The Whatsapp version 2.16.272 beta brings the Mentions (@) that can be used to quote a specific user in the groups. The one-to-one chats don’t support mentions since there will be one person to chat.

To use this new feature, you need to enter ‘@‘ followed by the user name. Recently, Facebook introduced the formatted text in Whatsapp like italicize (_text_), bold (*text*) and strikethrough (~text~); all these features work even after mentioning someone in the message. To reply to a specific message, recently the quote/reply option was also made live. You need to hold the message to quote and then tap on Reply symbol; that particular message will be embedded into the text box.

Talking about the upcoming video calling feature, rumors suggest the feature to be introduced first on iOS. Earlier voice calls are first made available for Android users and later extended to iOS and Windows Phone app. Though the company launched the Web, Windows, and Mac apps; there don’t work as a standalone app. The long rumored Whatsapp video calling will go live soon, but there isn’t any confirmed date.

Along with iOS and Android users; the Whatsapp video calling feature will be also made available for Windows Phone users. Google also tasted success with the Apple’s FaceTime knock-off Google Duo. As of now, it only supports one-on-one calls and in the near future, we may also see the group video call feature to go live. Coming to Whatsapp, we aren’t expecting the company to offer group video calling anytime soon since it doesn’t even have group voice calling feature like Facebook Messenger.

Stay tuned on Phone Radar to try out the upcoming Whatsapp video calling feature as earliest as possible.