Skype 1.0
On 27th of July, Skype launched version 1.0 of their software, and traditional phone companies around the world should be trembling in their shoes.
Created by the same people who brought the world the controversial file sharing network of KaZaA, Skype, like it's sibling makes use of peer to peer internet technology, but that is where the family likeness starts and ends.
Skype is free of adware and spyware, and serves a primary purpose that is not rather dubious on legal grounds.
The main purpose of Skype is to serve as an internet telephony application. Basically instead of picking up the phone to call friends and family, you can do this over the internet. If you are thinking that this is not new, you would be right. Internet telephony applications have been around for a while, but most of them don't work too well in this modern more security conscious era of the internet. Popular instant messenging applications ICQ and MSN Messenger both have telephony components, but these don't work with firewalls, also both programs are rather cluttered with advertising.
Skype doesn't suffer from any of these problems. It works fine through firewalls, is not cluttered with advertising, and now, you can call people even if they don't have a computer. The cost of calls is amazingly cheap, and although it may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first having to pay in Euros, this is good from the NZ point of view because the NZ dollar does not vary a great deal against the Euro, so you will have a fairly good idea how much you are actually paying. PC to PC calls are free, and other calls are prepaid with a minimum purchase of ?10.00 of credit. This is enough credit to talk for almost 10 hours to many countries, and the cost is based on where you call to, not where you call from. If you need to make peak calls within NZ, at a cost of approximately 4c per minute in NZ currency, this is remarkably cheap. In fact you can call numerous other countries for the same rate. Some countries do cost more, but the rates are still very reasonable.
Quality wise, Skype is not perfect. The conversation can have some echo, and if the internet connextion is busy, can break up occasionally. Overall quality is really very good, and one can hardly complain about something that is so cheap. Ideally, you will need a broadband connection, however Skype does function adequately over dialup connections. In the event that you can't hear each other, Skype features standard instant messaging features, a contact list, and file transfer capabilities.
One feature that stands out in the audio features is the ability to make conference calls, so that more than two people can take part in a conversation.
At this stage, one significant feature that is missing is video conferencing, but Skype's makers have said that they will add this at a later date. They rightly focused on creating a top class internet telephony application rather than getting distracted by trying to add all the bells and whistles at once.
Skype is available in a number of different languages.
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