Do you do most of your chatting over Gmail’s built-in chat feature because it’s so damn handy? Well good news! Now it’s on your phone! That, and most other chat systems: MSN Messenger, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and more. They all come in a new free app called Fring.

And they’re just the chat systems; the best bit is Skype. You can call Skype PCs from your phone (of course for free), and Skype PCs can call you. For free. You can use it to call iPhone to iPhone directly, for free. (That is, without using any of your call credit.) Has anyone noticed a trend here? Yeah, the iPhone just got free-er.

Fring puts all your Skype and chat contacts into one big list, showing you who’s online right now. You just tap a contact to chat or call:

The only problem is that Fring doesn’t run in the background all the time, meaning when you go back to the home screen you won’t be able to receive chats or Skype calls. This is because Apple doesn’t allow background apps to run. You can get around this by jailbreaking your phone and running backgrounder. Apple have a solution in the works that allows background apps to run, they just haven’t implemented it yet (even though they said they would by this time).  

Anyway, try it out! Free calls ain’t bad!