Recently in telephony…
Skype
- Skype is on the Nokia N800. This makes it interesting to own – video still doesn’t work, and it took them about six months since release to get Skype going. I felt beta-tester-y enough with the n770, so maybe I’ll just wait till the N900 launches next year?
- In Skype related news, I’ve been running the 1.4 beta for over a month now, and it works remarkably well. Its better, seems a little like the version on OS X, and manages my USB headset a lot better (i.e. I don’t need to manually change to use it everytime). Of course, Linux itself seems to be retarded – every time I plug the headset, the microphone is muted – silly.
Gizmo Project
- If you’re upgrading Gizmo, and are using the Debian packages, and you’re running Ubuntu Feisty, get the version linked against libstdc++5 and not libstdc++6 – the latter gives sexy errors like gizmo: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. It used to be one DEB or RPM, but clearly they’ve changed things.
- I installed Gizmo for S60 from the Nokia Beta Labs on my E61i. Now when I visit my Contacts, and scroll to the right, I see a Gizmo menu. Let it go online (via 3G or WiFi, I take the latter), and you can chat with Gizmo Project users, or even make calls. Best thing is, if you’ve enabled Gizmo VoIP in the Internet telephone settings, you can also make VoIP out calls to people’s numbers that they’ve listed in the Gizmo profile – these are usually free if you’re going after a landline. Make sure your all call’s free status is active, and you’re bound to save money.
VoIP
- I’ve played around with Jajah. The rates seem higher than I’d expect, but maybe this is the future of VoIP? With ISP’s starting to get sneaky with regards to their quotas, having a website that calls you, then calls your party, plus displays advertising features in the web browser window, just seems smart. Plus, if you’re calling another Jajah user, you get free calls – 150 minutes a week, not exceeding 500 minutes a month. If you ask me, that’s a lot of talk time, and I’m all for it. My Jajah username is byte if you’re so inclined to find me in the address book. So far, call quality has been amazing, all connections have just worked with one try (so the service is reliable), and they’re beta testing conference call features (which I intend to try soon).
- PennyTel is an Aussie VoIP provider, that’s got a twist – you can get dial in direct (DID) numbers from any state in Australia, and also, if required, a number based in Kuala Lumpur, all for AUD$5/month! They’re also fully SIP based, so Ekiga and my Nokia e61i are pretty happy.
- Quality of the service however, is another question – its a tad bit unreliable, apparently people get busy tones when they try to dial my number, and if I make a call via the e61i, I get a lot of “connection time-out” errors. Annoyingly, the other side picks up, and hears nothing, thus hanging up. With Ekiga, its quite the opposite – it rings within a few seconds, I get connected, but the other party seemingly can’t hear me! Calls within Australia seem to be somewhat tolerable, from what I can tell though.
- This could also be because the DID I chose was a Malaysian based number.
- Support is pretty good – they even have a Live Assistant online, who can chat with you via IM, to give you support. They’re also quite responsive with regards to writing support requests, though I have a lot of “Work In Progress” messages sitting in the queue (so initial response is good, but actually getting things going, isn’t quite so).
Et al.
- There’s also an OpenMoko beta phone available for a ridiculous sum, that still does not have WiFi, and they claim that running VoIP over GPRS will not be so good – really? I run it on my e61i just fine, so I smell a rat, maybe with the processor or software. Again, time to wait for this in a few more months, I guess.
Technorati Tags: telephony, skype, n800, internet tablets, gizmo, gizmo project, gizmo s60, s60, series 60, jajah, pennytel, sip, malaysian did, openmoko
since we moved to the new place, we have decided to ditch landline and take up a broadband only solution. for long distance call, we tried VoIP using Gizmo and Sipgate. Result – gizmo is not that 100% good in terms of quality. People will notice it is not as good as normal landline, while sipgate for local calls are so far great.
oh ya, and with sipgate i get a local landline number for free. that is a goodie. So until someone cut my broadband, i will not pay Telekom any cents for landline rental.
I use
http://minowireless.com
myself
At least it has a Java client that runs on my Treo 680