Skype

Full review
Lets flash back to the year 1997, I was about to graduate from high school I had won free airline tickets to Israel from El Air but since it didn’t include cash for food and lodging I was using the Internet to arrange free and low cost housing in the land of Yisrael. At the time I had a 56.6 kbs modem and was using a program called iphone and CUSME. For those of you that think iPhone is a much anticipated Apple product or
maybe Cisco program that Apple will be paying millions for, you have to understand in 1995 iPhone was a VOIP program (before VOIP was a term) that allowed people to make computer to computer calls. CUCME (see you see me) allowed people to video conference way back in 1996. Thatright if you were a geek enough in 1996, you could have had a video phone, and all this was done with 56.6 modems and even 33.6 kps modems.

Fast forward to Skype:
Skype does everything iPhone and CUCME did in the 1990’s but it does it in a way that is simple and as a single program. No longer are you worrying about does the person you are calling have full duplex or half duplex sound cards. Yes believe it or not in the past sound cards could process outgoing audio or process incoming audio but not do both.
With Skype you can be sure that if someone you want to talk to has it installed it WILL work. And keep in mind that iPhone used to work on 36.6 modems anyone with a broadband connection will have MORE than enough bandwidth to give you near perfect audio. BTW your cell phone is encoded at 6-9 kbs, so SKYPE should be higher quality than your typical cell phone conversation.
So what is SKYPE:
It would be easier to answer what skpe doesn’t do. NOT MUCH.
You can talk to people for free using SKYPE to SKYPE
You can talk to people for pennies using SKYPE to landline (or cell phone)
You can use video conference
You can talk to people with video when you don’t
You can transfer files
You can CHAT, you remember chatting that quaint way of communicating with text
You can play games
You can meet strangers with similar interest as your self
------------>You can then do ANY of the above with them
You can conference call with multiple people either landline based or Skype based or a multiple of the 2. You can have up to 9 parties on your line.
You can get voicemail
With the exception of Skype to landline and voicemail all the above features are free, so I’ll talk about the payments next.


PAY with Paypal

Skype is now owned by eBay so my contract is via paypal, I can set it up that it will automatically add more money when I start to get low, but at $0.021 a minute to China and a minimum purchase of $10.00 I don’t see that happening very soon, that is nearly 476 minutes of talk time. Now there is a $0.04 connection fee so depending on the number of calls I make I’ll loose about 2 minutes per call, but since the cheapest calling card I have is $0.029 a minute if I call a 312 number (long distance for me where I live), this is by far a great savings.

There is also a $0.50 service charge for NOT using paypal, so I suggest using paypal if you can.

Conference Call

As I said I am using this for calling my parents in China, and when my Dad needed Dell technical support I had Skpye call Dell’s 800
number (NO CHARGE and NO connection fee) and my dad’s cell phone in China ($0.021 plus a $0.04 connection charge). There was no additional fee for conference calling and the quality was perfect. I think the guy from Dell was impressed also.

MICROPHONE

Of course to use Skype you will need a microphone and headphone combo otherwise you will get echoes and maybe even feedback. I purchased my Skype headphone set for $4.95 at radio shack and it came with a SKYPE CD and $0.50 in free phone calls.


My mother is using a much more sophisticated skype headphone hers is USB and cost $85, I like mine better. USB requires the correct drivers to load and that doesn’t always happen.
My dad is using a $15 headset with microphone his is the best, it is not as cheap sounding as my $5 headphone, but not as complicated at my mom’s $85 monster, but in all cases headphones and microphones are about capturing and transmitting audio from the program.

Making the call

Just like AOL IM you can create friends lists and see if they are online and talk to them for free. But you can also typing in a phone number and call out, just as easily. Want to add a phone number to your friends list, no problem! Just give it a name and anyone is just a
click away.

Final thoughts

Voice Over Internet Protocol is nothing new, but SKYPE has done it great, audio quality is superb, the ability to do real world phone calls is if not unique a great feature, the ability to do almost anything you can think of is constantly surprising and that it does it WELL, is even more surprising.