10:37 by FoxTwo
Gizmo Rules! Skype's Just Hype
When they converged into telephones too, suddenly all the required hardware was in one neat package - WiFi, mic, speaker. With WiFi you can hook onto the Internet. When you have a mic you can talk. Thus even a Palm TX (no mic, not a phone) can be used to talk to other people, perhaps even people on normal phones, if you get a BT earpiece :)
On the Internet, for VOIP there's the standards-based SIP, and the proprietery Skype. Skype's more popular, probably due to better marketing. Now, personally I have always been a standards-based kinda guy - I tend to embrace open standards more readily than closed, proprietery ones - popularity be damned.
Gizmo Project is actually the best competitor, in my opinion, to Skype. In my past entries you'd know that I preferred Gizmo over Skype for personal reasons. Sound quality is comparable to Skype, call outs to ordinary phones are usually cheaper than Skype's offerings. In fact, I make calls to Hong Kong mobile phones pretty much regularly. If I had been using normal telephones, the costs would be pretty expensive, probably somewhere around $10 to $20 per hour (estimate)
However, because I was calling with Gizmo Project, the costs were reduced dramatically. For a 90 minute call to a Hong Kong mobile phone, it cost me only 90 cents US. That would be something like S$1.50. For 90 minutes! That's damn cheap. Skype's offering to the same location costs about 2.5 times more, so that 90 cents US would be about US$2.25 (S$3.78) if I had been using Skype.
If I had a business of my own I'd be using VOIP for all my telephony needs! Cost savings are incredible! Also, these services such as Gizmo Project, usually offer a "Call-in" service, meaning you get a phone number for people to call you on your VOIP phone too. Some might charge for this "Call in" service, some might be free. It just depends on what you want and which you can find.
All I can say is, using Gizmo Project, my HK friend could not tell that I'm calling "long distance". To her it sounded exactly like a normal mobile phone call. To me, she sounded like a mobile phone call too - almost no difference as if I were calling someone's in Singapore.
Naturally, calls made to other Gizmo users, or even other users on other software but using the SIP standard, are FREE. Yes, free. You just need to know their SIP number (like their "internet telephone number") and just dial away. Cool huh?
And, if you set up your PC with a Bluetooth dongle, you can pair your regular handphone's bluetooth earpiece to the PC, and use it to talk, handsfree :) At least it's much better than wearing bulking headsets with mics.
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