Why didn’t I know about Skype before I left for the Adriatic this last summer? I could have talked with my family and friends for free the whole time. Email’s great, but hey, sometimes its just nice to hear your mom’s voice!
My friends Lyn and Taro moved to Kyoto for a few months and we’ve been talking for FREE using a combination of Skype and iChat. iChat’s great when you have a lot of bandwidth and, sure, it’s fun to actually do that Jetson’s thing and videophone…but Skype has had reliably fabulous quality with voice and we hasn’t dropped our connection, either.
Lyn and I are working on a couple of projects together, and when we talk we can trade docs and graphics back and forth without a hitch, as well. Try THAT with the telephone!
I also signed up for 10 Euros of credit to get a Skype phone number. The cost per minute to telephone and real telephone anywhere in the world is drastically less than using a telephone service.
So if you’re traveling with your laptop, get a mic (or camera/mic like the iSight) to talk for free and make calls to non-Skypers (like hotels and tourist offices) for a drastically reduced per-minute charge.
Watch out for crack calls, spam calls, just trying calls, wakeup calls, annoing calls….make sure you don’t automatically accept authorization exchanges !!
Also, if you put a html link with your Skyoe call name, people can just press the link and call..
Click here