The new Google video conferencing app is here. It’s called “Meet” and it is better than Hangouts.

The interface is smooth and clean. It integrates with Gmail and Google Calendar seamlessly.

The audio quality was good, but the video quality was fairly low. I went into the settings and found that it defaulted to 360p resolution and maxed out at 720p. That seems ridiculously low on both accounts. Also, why not just try to do the best possible resolution available based on the network connection? I get that there are issues with pushing big video streams, but this is the 21st century and I want to see every clogged pore of my video conference buddies.

It also had a cool feature of Closed Captioning, which it does with speech recognition and it managed to be pretty close to what was being said.

Sharing/presenting a screen was easy to do and worked well for what I needed to share.

Lacking was the ability to record the meeting or save chats and/or captions.

I’m sure Google will work to make it better and never shut it down with a new re-branded tool in a couple of years. So, there is at least that.