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Comment by nicoles | Hacker News Reader

I went on a trip to Japan in May, and line came back with me. It's got excellent group chat support for a mobile chat app, good quality voice calling, and is a really 'solid' feeling app. If you're going on a vacation with a bunch of friends I can't think of a better app to keep everyone in touch while you're on your adventure.

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Seriously, for all that some people might dislike the silly/cute games/stickers/addons/yadayada, the basic LINE app is very good, vastly better than most of the other free voice/talk apps I've tried: much better voice quality and far less buggy than skype, much better quality and less buggy than kakaotalk, etc, and there's no point in even comparing to garbage like vibber or whatsapp.

Moreover, because it's so popular, as soon as I ran it for the first time, a bunch of people I knew just popped up automatically in my contact list (presumably matched with numbers in my phone's address book)...

I'm fairly new to Line, but with anime/manga lovers bias aside, I find those stamps feature very useful. It's not necessary the way to augment conversations but it helps to respond to subject that I don't have insight or prefer not to respond in details; I think it lowers a bar on burden to prevent awkward silence.

As for the software, my 91 years old grandfather in Japan just got iPhone as his first smartphone ever. He also signed up to Line as well so he can communicate with rest of relatives (including myself) who happened to be three different all over the US. I am impressed that he is learning it quick. I think the part of it is the fact it's not as intimidating as other solutions.

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