When all the cool kids were raving about Skype, I went and signed up for an account. I haven’t used it much. I think I got maybe two calls on it, and both times I didn’t have a microphone handy to actually take the call. Something about Skype always made me a little uneasy. Maybe it was the fact that they didn’t reveal just how it worked. What encryption was in use? Could they drop in on your calls? Well, now that eBay bought Skype, I don’t think I’ll use them much anymore. eBay is known for not being a very privacy friendly company, and let’s face it, their customer support sucks.
So what’s a guy like me to do? Well, luckily Michael Robertson (the same guy behind MP3.com and Linspire), has started a cool toy called Gizmo, which is based on standard SIP technology. That’s nice. They also have clients available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (linspire based debs, but whatever, it works fine on Ubuntu).
What makes this really nice is that first, you get a free quarter to make phone calls. At 1.8 cents a minute to the US this won’t go really far, but it should be enough for me to make a phone call or two. Second, because it’s SIP based, you can dial into your client from any regular phone. There’s a list of access numbers for a large number of cities. Just pick an access number, press 1, and then type the SIP Phone number you’d like to dial (my SIP number is 1-747-617-4120). With free long distance dialing on cell phones, this means that it’s no problem to call my computer from your cell phone. That’s cool.
They’ve also got a slew of other nifty features, mainly made possible by using a real standard. For example, if I get a voice mail, it gets emailed to my GMail account as a wav file. Then I can download the file and listen to the message at my leisure. I would also think that in theory that it should be compatable with MythPhone, so you can easily integrate a phone into your MythTV box. I’m just in a state of wow right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll need to find a way to hook up Asterisk too.