Skype 2.5 Beta: First Impressions
Skype 2.5 Beta is out for Mac OS X. Bottom line is, I’m rather excited and hope that we’ll see more of this in Linux land (webcam support, SMS).
I eagerly tried out the SMS feature, which is something I’ve longed for. It costs 0.071 Euros to send a message to an Australian mobile. At today’s exchange rates, thats about 12 cents Australian. Cheapest SMS sending facility available, I would think (15 cents on the 3 network, 25 cents on the Optus network), save for free services such as smspup.
By default it sends out messages sent out as your Skype name. What they don’t tell you in their default warning is that the custom ID is usually limited to the first 11 characters. For that, you’ve got to learn about setting your sender ID. All fine and well, another 12 cents down the drain and now SMS messages sent from Skype look like they come from my mobile phone!
I can imagine this being annoying when I move between Australia and Malaysia and want my number to be set in a certain way, but I’ll worry about that when the time actually comes.
The Show History feature is completely useless. Last time I used to be able to tell what calls were made, and what the duration of the call was going to be. To make it more useful, it should have shown me how much it was going to cost. Now the only way to get such information is via logging into their web-based interface.
Reviewing the changelog it does seem like some of the bugs that annoyed me (like not seeing any text in a Skype chat window when the main chat window was closed – affectionately known as the grey blank chat window) have been fixed. Maybe it’ll be more friendly with my USB headset (i.e. I don’t have to go to Preferences to “activate” it).
I like your blog. I am in the process of setting up a new site called textual.tv where people can send free SMS initialy and get cheap SMS for life. Once it is up and running maybe you can write a review about it. It will go live in early June. Let me know what you think and I can arrange to give you a free beta tester account soon. http://www.textual.tv.
Cheers
Sebastian