Finally, a competitor to Skype.
Voice over IP (VoIP) is getting a lot of buzz lately, and as a result, many folks are hearing about Skype that wouldn’t have otherwise.
Skype has two major things going for it:
- Skype is firewall-friendly. To many this won’t be an issue, but in some cases, particularly with older firewalls, this is key to making VoIP work.
- More importantly, Skype is easy to set up.
However, it also has a major weakness in that it is based entirely on a closed, proprietary system.
I’ve mentioned Free World Dialup in the past. I’ll freely admit that this service is a little more geeky than most people are willing to deal with, even my friends in the IT field to a large extent. It’s not that it’s hard, but it does take some fairly intensive manual configuration to make X-Lite work when you first set it up.
Enter Gizmo Project. A product of FWD competitor SIPPhone, Gizmo offers both an extremely simple set up and standards-based connectivity. In fact, you can talk not only to other Gizmo/SIPPhone users, but also to a variety of other VoIP providers (both free and commercial). I’m particularly pleased with call quality. This is huge and has so far allowed me to ignore some of the issues with the user interface; after all, the software is version 0.8.44.
Feel free to give me a call at “scottr” on Gizmo!