{"id":595,"date":"2007-07-27T01:53:29","date_gmt":"2007-07-27T06:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/07\/27\/recently-in-telephony"},"modified":"2007-07-27T01:56:12","modified_gmt":"2007-07-27T06:56:12","slug":"recently-in-telephony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/07\/27\/recently-in-telephony","title":{"rendered":"Recently in telephony&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Skype<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Skype is on the Nokia N800. This makes it interesting to own &#8211; video still doesn&#8217;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&#8217;ll just wait till the N900 launches next year?<\/li>\n<li>In Skype related news, I&#8217;ve been running the <a href=\"http:\/\/share.skype.com\/sites\/linux\/2007\/06\/skype_for_linux_14_beta.html\">1.4 beta<\/a> 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&#8217;t need to manually change to use it everytime). Of course, Linux itself seems to be retarded &#8211; every time I plug the headset, the microphone is muted &#8211; silly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Gizmo Project<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you&#8217;re upgrading Gizmo, and are using the Debian <a href=\"http:\/\/download.gizmoproject.com\/download-linux.html\">packages<\/a>, and you&#8217;re running Ubuntu Feisty, get the version linked against libstdc++5 and not libstdc++6 &#8211; the latter gives sexy errors like <tt>gizmo: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.<\/tt> It used to be one DEB or RPM, but clearly they&#8217;ve changed things.<\/li>\n<li>I installed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nokia.com\/A4403822\">Gizmo for S60<\/a> 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&#8217;ve enabled Gizmo VoIP in the Internet telephone settings, you can also make VoIP out calls to people&#8217;s numbers that they&#8217;ve listed in the Gizmo profile &#8211; these are usually free if you&#8217;re going after a landline. Make sure your <a href=\"http:\/\/support.gizmoproject.com\/index.php?_a=knowledgebase&amp;_j=questiondetails&amp;_i=209\">all call&#8217;s free<\/a> status is active, and you&#8217;re bound to save money.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>VoIP<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve played around with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jajah.com\/\">Jajah<\/a>. The rates seem higher than I&#8217;d expect, but maybe this is the future of VoIP? With ISP&#8217;s starting to get <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/07\/23\/the-last-couple-of-weeks\">sneaky<\/a> 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&#8217;re calling another Jajah user, you get free calls &#8211; 150 minutes a week, not exceeding 500 minutes a month. If you ask me, that&#8217;s a lot of talk time, and I&#8217;m all for it. My Jajah username is <strong>byte<\/strong> if you&#8217;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&#8217;re beta testing conference call features (which I intend to try soon).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pennytel.com\/\">PennyTel<\/a> is an Aussie VoIP provider, that&#8217;s got a twist &#8211; 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&#8217;re also fully SIP based, so Ekiga and my Nokia e61i are pretty happy.\n<ul>\n<li>Quality of the service however, is another question &#8211; 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 &#8220;connection time-out&#8221; errors. Annoyingly, the other side picks up, and hears nothing, thus hanging up. With Ekiga, its quite the opposite &#8211; it rings within a few seconds, I get connected, but the other party seemingly can&#8217;t hear me! Calls within Australia seem to be somewhat tolerable, from what I can tell though.<\/li>\n<li>This could also be because the DID I chose was a Malaysian based number.<\/li>\n<li>Support is pretty good &#8211; they even have a Live Assistant online, who can chat with you via IM, to give you support. They&#8217;re also quite responsive with regards to writing support requests, though I have a lot of &#8220;Work In Progress&#8221; messages sitting in the queue (so initial response is good, but actually getting things going, isn&#8217;t quite so).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Et al.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;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 &#8211; 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/telephony\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">telephony<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/skype\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">skype<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/n800\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">n800<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/internet%20tablets\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">internet tablets<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/gizmo\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">gizmo<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/gizmo%20project\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">gizmo project<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/gizmo%20s60\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">gizmo s60<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/s60\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">s60<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/series%2060\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">series 60<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/jajah\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">jajah<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/pennytel\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">pennytel<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/sip\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">sip<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/malaysian%20did\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">malaysian did<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/openmoko\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">openmoko<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Skype Skype is on the Nokia N800. This makes it interesting to own &#8211; video still doesn&#8217;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&#8217;ll just wait till the N900 launches next year? In Skype related news, I&#8217;ve been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4vJD-9B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}