True, Google has entered the Social networking arena rather late but the delay has been more than compensated by their update that has thrown a challenge to established players, such as Facebook, Facetime, Microsoft owned Skype and ooVoo. The emphasis, of course is on communication through video while a lot of other innovative features have also been added to increase the charm of this live streaming video platform called Hangouts. Here are some of the outstanding features of Hangouts that will turn you crazy for Google Plus sooner.

Automatic Photo And Video Backup at Full Size

With the help of this feature you can set all your photos and videos to back up automatically to your associated Google Drive folder as you go on taking them. What’s more, you can opt for backing up all these on your mobile device, if you so wish. Then there is the option of backing up your pictures and videos at standard or full size. It also allows you to go for back ups when connected over WiFi and mobile connection.

Auto Awesome

In keeping with name, this feature offers a bunch of unique photo and video enhancements, such as Auto Awesome Action which is known to combine a set of photos into a single shot to simulate motion; Auto Awesome Eraser, which can literally remove unwanted background or even persons from a photo and Auto Awesome Movie, which can automatically stitch chosen videos and still images together, thus creating a mini-movie.

Animated GIF Support

Instead of sending and sharing lifeless, tiresome images, Google+ Hangouts can send and share animated GIFs.

Full Screen HD

To make your video more appealing, Google+ Hangouts can help reproduce Full Screen 720p HD.Incidentally, Google+ Hangouts allows you to initiate video conferences with up to 10 persons at a time from your computer or your mobile device – feature that none of the existing social network platforms can ever hope to provide.  However, Google + Hangouts also has features that are not only novel but also helpful for people living in the digital world, such as:

Location Sharing

Whenever you need inform about your location while on the move without bothering to type in the address, Google+ Hangouts’ location sharing feature can broadcast your precise location in a jiffy. This may be set to near about (through your WiFi network) or dead accurate (with the help of GPS). All you have to do to take advantage of this boils down to clicking the map pin icon in your current Hangout session to launch the Google Maps locater and clicking ‘share location’.

SMS Support

Prior to the upgrade, sending an SMS to a Google+ pal required you to toggle between the app and your texting platform. But not now, as Google Hangouts for mobile currently comes with full SMS functionality, which essentially allows you to send and receive text messages (or pics or videos) from inside the Hangouts app sans being logged into Hangouts. This need not be taken as a way of bypassing your carrier’s text limit since texts still count toward your carrier’s rate. Incidentally, Hangouts works on all Android devices 4.0 or higher.

Perceptive Search

Most people neither have the time nor the inclination of naming their photos for later reference or to page through their expansive online photo gallery in search of something they want to share. Now new with Google+ Hangouts,  it’s simple to take a snapshot on your phone, save it to Drive, and then locate it later by keying in a search term. According to Google, it can now recognize over 1,000 different objects. This will purportedly make it easy to enter in search terms like “bike” or “mountain” to instantly access all photos of bikes or mountains in your Drive gallery. Searches can be limited to your own gallery or expanded to include the shared images of your friends in Circles.

Bottom Line

Check up, if you have the time to see if any of the established social networking sites can provide the features that Google+ Hangouts can. In fact, many people use Hangouts more than they use their phone. But do you know why? Convenience – what else?