September 2007

What do you look for in a headset? When I’m headset shopping (which is probably more often then your average geek) I always look for three characteristics: reliability, comfort and good sound. Quite often you only get two out of three—I’ve seen headsets a plenty that have been reliable and good sounding but not comfortable, or comfortable and good sounding but not reliable.

So it was with some anxiousness that I opened up the .Audio 625 USB Headset that Plantronics recently sent me to try out. Would this headset meet my high headset standards? Fortunately yes, the .Audio 625 is indeed reliable, comfortable and good sounding (great sounding, even), and it’s quickly become my regular, go-to headset. Why? Read on to find out.

Continue reading "Skypegear Roadtest: Plantronics .Audio 625 USB Headset" »

Villu has already mentioned it on the main blog but it’s certainly worth repeating here: 3’s X-Series is now available in Ireland.

We’ve mentioned X-Series a couple times on the blog before, but for the uninitiated: X-Series is an add-on to 3 mobile phone contracts that gives you access to several great applications—including Skype, eBay, Yahoo!, and mobile email and podcasts—on your mobile wherever you are. The Skype client lets you make unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls and see all your buddies’ statuses on your handset (though there’s no chat functionality).

In Ireland the Nokia E65 and N73 are currently supported for X-Series, and more handsets will be added soon.

3 has networks around the world, with X-Series now available in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, and the UK in addition to Ireland. For you globetrotters, it’s worth noting that Hutchinson, the company behind 3, has an extraordinarily sensible roaming policy—if you’re on any of their networks, you pay only your regular tariff without any extra charges. It’s called ‘3 Like Home’ and it’s one of the reasons (in addition to Skype of course) that I’m switching to 3 later this month when my contract with my current provider expires.

You can learn more about X-Series on the official X-Series Blog here.

We’ve mentioned it while it was a rumor but now it’s official—Netgear has launched the followup to its popular SPH101 WiFi phone: the SPH200W. In addition to making the phone a little smaller (and upping the battery life to a typical 4 hour talk time / 48 hour standby time), it has two cool improvements: it now includes a cradle (so you’ll know where it is and it’ll hopefully always be charged when you need it) and it works on T-Mobile USA’s hotspot network (if you already have an account of course), so you can use it at the thousands of T-Mobile hotspots across the US (link to map here).

Being able to use the SPH200W at T-Mobile hotspots makes Skype a lot more mobile. Wherever you are in the US, you probably aren’t far from a Starbucks and they nearly always have a T-Mobile hotspot inside. Getting your caffeine fix and Skype fix quickly and easily without lugging around a laptop? Sounds pretty awesome to me.

You can read more about the SPH200W at Netgear’s site here, and you can purchase it from Skype’s US Store for $149.99 here.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll be well aware of my affinity for Skype Certified products. It’s for good reason: after the engineers at Skype put a product or piece of software through its paces, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a great Skype experience when you use it.

But what does this ‘putting a product through its paces’ entail? The certification process is a whole lot more than just slapping a logo on a box. You can learn a lot about what goes on, including specific checks made for different product types, in the Skype Developer Zone, but to be honest some of the information there is a bit dry—it’s meant for the people who actually develop the products.

With nearly 200 products now Skype Certified, I wanted to learn more about how the certification process actually works, so I asked Pontus Randén, a Skype engineer in Estonia, a few questions and he was kind enough to provide answers.

Continue reading "Skypegear Interview: Skype's Pontus Randén on Certification" »

You may remember the recent summer competition that the Skype hardware team put on that had some really great prizes, including SMC WiFi phones, laptops from Fujitsu-Siemens, and a grand prize of a €5000 euro travel voucher to go anywhere in the world.

The question was: If you could call anyone in the world, who would you choose to call and why?

I wasn’t privy to judging the (literally) thousands of entries that the hardware team received, but I have had the chance to see some of the winning entries that the judges chose, and I think they’re great.

Continue reading "Skypegear Interview: Summer Competition Winner!" »