November 2006

News reaches me via the latest issue of don't-buy-that-buy-this magazine and Thoroughly Good Read, Which?, that more than one third of us received an unwanted Christmas pressie last year.

What Which? meant to say, of course, was that every single last bloody one of us received at least one unwanted Christmas pressie last year, but that only just over a third of us admitted it. Cowards.

Smellies such as toiletries and aftershave topped the list of rubbishness, with clothes, gadgets and unwanted books bringing up the rear.

Stop this madness! Please, people: stop throwing away your money on nuclear-reactive smellies, novelty slippers, pink bathtowels and other stuff that's headed for the landfill. Think: what will save them time, hassle and money? What will give them what they really want – a cut-price hotline to their distant loved ones this Crimble?

Answer: a Skype starter kit complete with headphones, software CD and SkypeOut voucher. Then they'll be able to spend all of 25 December gassing with their favourite people, rather than trying to make conversation with ones they've been forced to spend Christmas with.

You know how it is: you're shuffling home at 2am after another ill-advised festive shindig, and you need to pick up some milk and onions and stuff. But they won't take your Switch card. Or Maestro, or whatever it's called now. Cash only, and there's no cashpoint for miles. So you head home, onionless.

Life would be so much easier if everyone in the world took Paypal. A big yellow 'Pay Now' button on every shop till, like in your eBay emails. This would be especially great in January and February, when your Paypal balance is riding high after you've eBayed off all your unwanted pressies. Hey, it's just common-sense recycling.

Skype, of course, does accept Paypal – and many more payment methods besides, including lesser-spotted forms of plastic (Diners, Solo), Ukash and Moneybookers. No idea what Ukash and Moneybookers are? Then head for the all-new Ways to pay page, where you can find out about the oodles of different ways to pay for Skype credit, Skype vouchers and other Skype stuff.

Intriguing Skype-based activity going down on eBay at the moment. Check out this page to see two very smiley men, one of whom is what Ray off The X Factor will look in 2046, flogging their cookery skills to the highest bidder.

Bear with me, I'm still trying to figure out the Skype connection.

OK I get it. Emeril (we'll call him "Ray") and Bobby are Very Famous TV chefs from the US Food Network, and they're selling a Skype video chat with themselves. Win the auction and you get a cookery lesson via the magic of webcam, and your cashmoney goes to charity. Everyone's a winner!

The auction ends on 3 December, and you'll get your vid lesson on 7 December. Important health and safety note to complete beginners: 7 Dec may be a little too early to start cooking your actual Crimble dinner.

If your Christmas list is looking a bit sparse, what with its pathetic line-up of a Nintendo Wii, Panasonic Blu-ray player, Planet Earth box set, Prada handbag, Now That's What I Call Music 65 and giant Dairy Milk, then here's something to fill out the page: the DUALphone 3088 cordless phone from RTX.

The latest Skype-certified phone goes on sale at the Skype Shop from this Friday (1 December... yep, it's December already, but look on the bright side – it's nearly spring) with an RRP of £99, and it'll certainly look chipper on your sideboard.

But what's so good about it? Well, you don't need to have your computer switched on to make Skype calls using the handset. In fact, you don't even need a computer at all, though you do need a broadband router and a net connection. Ideally one that works. Unlike mine. Yes... but that's a whinge for another day. At least the net cafe is warmer than my house.

Continue reading "DUALphone 3088: Who needs PCs anyway?" »

Say what you like about Sainsbury's, but at least the mondo-chain has made it easy to give the gift of Skype by selling Skype Vouchers over the counter. Also, they have great deli counters and massive packs of recycled loo roll. Thumbs up.

Until now, Sainsbury's was the only place you could buy Skype Vouchers in the UK, but that's all changed. You can now buy £10 and £20 vouchers in 5,500 newsagents and convenience stores across the nation via e-pay terminals, which also sell such communicative conveniences as mobile top-ups and long-distance calling cards. Not that you'll need those once you've stocked up your Skype credit.

You can also now buy the vouchers in Martin McColl stores, of which there are apparently 1,500 in the UK, though I don't think I've ever been in one. Where are they all? Please send me a photo of one if you can enlighten me. And directions. Much obliged.

My visit to the developer zone yesterday turned into something of a magical mystery tour of brilliant new Skypetastic apps. Click any link and you find yourself wowing over ideas dreamt up and created by big-brained Skypers while they could be down the pub or lying in front of Strictly Come Dancing.

One of my favourite sections is Community Projects, where you get to road-test all the fabulous and curious apps that might one day take their place in the official Skype app family.

Continue reading "Nosing around the Community Projects" »

Dedicated followers of Skype may be aware of a couple of new updates to Skype 3.0 for Windows beta – especially those of you who've discovered the Garage in the developer zone.

The Garage is Skype's new venue for preview and beta versions of the software, including the latest Skype for Linux and Skype for Windows Mobile as well as the Windows and Mac versions. It's also your place to find patches, open source contributions and other Skype-based tinkering that's yet to be unleashed upon the general public. This, my friend, is the bleeding edge of internet telephony.

Be warned: if you don't know your rss from your html code, you may find some of the chatter as intelligible as a Greek computer science thesis. But if you're an experienced Skyper and want to stay way ahead of what the company's developers are doing, you'll find the Garage forum fascinating and the resources very useful indeed. Find out more in the Garage blog.

Sharing, as they told you in school assembly, is good. Sharing Skype with a friend, as they would have said in school assembly if Skype had existed then, is very good indeed.

Skype’s website has all sorts of ways to remind you about the virtues of sharing Skype, and my favourites are the Nice Little Movies that reveal just how good sharing can be. After all, as Skype points out, sharing is how babies are made…

As if Skype's own Shop weren't enough, it now seems that shopping portals are setting up their very own Skype pages.

One notable example is DoorOne.co.uk, the new venture from Shopping.com. Portals and price-finders like these are brilliant for time-started and penny-watching shoppers who'd rather not waste hours schlepping round every shop on the high street to find the best price for the latest gadget.

DoorOne.co.uk's Skype section lays on some innovative ways of finding the right kit for you. You can narrow down your search by brand, price and even by design – do you want your headset to sit over your head, over your ear, in your ear? You decide!

You'll also see which Skype gadgets are the most popular with other shoppers, and even read what people have to say about them in the buyers' guides. Got to be worth a look.

Looking for a Christmas pressie that's useful, user-friendly, sexy in a gadget-tastic kind of way and comes in at under a hundred quid?

Here's a neat idea. Skype's £99 Wifi phone package includes everything you need to make wireless calls without a computer, and a few treats besides. You get a Wifi phone from Skype's partners SMC and a Wifi router from FON, the world's biggest Wifi community; 500 minutes of SkypeOut calls to landlines and mobiles, and a year's free Skype Voicemail. Buy all that stuff separately and it'd cost you £120, so the bundle saves you enough for a couple of new CDs and a glass or two of mulled wine. Result.

If you'd like to save even more cash without being a complete tightwad, buy your loved one a Skype cordless bundle instead – it's only £39. For that you get a cordless handset from RTX, 300 minutes of SkypeOut calls and a year's free Skype Voicemail.

Or you could buy them a pair of socks. Next year, they'll give you a set of hankies. What comes around...

The newly-announced beautiful relationship between Skype and mobile giant 3 is manna to globetrotting chat addicts... and telly addicts.

A 3G mobile phone with Skype built in, that also lets you watch and control your home TV wherever you are in the world? Yep, I’ll have one of those.

3's new X-Series phones, such as the Nokia N73 that goes on sale on 1 December, are fabulous little bundles of gadgetry. Not only do they let you make unlimited Skype calls using the 3G network, but you can also browse the web, watch your home telly using Sling (though you'll need a Slingbox for that) and access your home PC remotely with Orb.

So, is this magic gizmo any good?

Continue reading "Skype hooks up with 3" »

Mac users, rejoice: your Skype experience is about to get a whole lot chattier. The new Skype 2.5 Beta for Mac lets you send SMS text messages to SkypeOut contacts, and includes 10-way conference calling.

So it's an ideal Christmas treat for those of us whose family and friends are scattered around the world. My mum lives in Spain, my best college mate lives in San Francisco, my dad has a habit of jetting to New Zealand for the winter... is it something I said?

Among other new features, Mac users will now be able to choose which audio device to use during incoming and outbound calling. So if you prefer to listen through headphones but make outgoing calls with a speakerphone, here's your answer.

To find out more and to give the new beta a spin, nip over to the Skype Mac blog.

China, as any internet user knows, is about to take over the world. It's just a shame that Mandarin is such a devilishly hard language to learn... all those characters, you see.

But I digress. Latest evidence of China's almightiness is its fervent enthusiasm for Skype, which has signed up almost 100,000 new Chinese users a day over the past three months.

Skype's partner in China, Tom Online, now has at least 23.5 million registered users in China – and analysts reckon that could be a wild underestimate.

Chinese legal barriers mean that SkypeOut isn't available there, and Skype's chief exec Niklas Zennström recently admitted it could be two years before China's government changes its mind. When and if SkypeOut does become available there, just watch those numbers shoot up again. Now that's popularity.

If your Monday is shaping up a fraction as badly as mine is, you may welcome some light relief – looking at pretty pictures, perhaps? Then get yourself over to Flickr, a fantastic online community of photographers whose snaps can lift the spirits and gladden the heart. Among their number is my friend Jaanus, author of the Skype Share blog.

Jaanus's Flickr page is a treasure trove of Skype screenshots, birthday cards sent to Skype by creatively-minded Skypers, and even some shots of Skype's new Tallinn office – a work in progress, but already looking more green and pleasant than anything you'll see in London.

Taxi for Hoskyn to Estonia, please!

Google has added a Skype option to its free downloadable software suite, Google Pack.

Skype is the latest addition to a bumper line-up of programs hand-picked and packaged together by Google. The pack also includes Google Earth, Google Desktop, the photo organiser Picasa, Google Toolbar and the Google Pack screensaver, and additional options include the (rather fabulous) Mozilla Firefox browser, Norton Antivirus – and now Skype.

Another day, another numerical milestone for Skype – only this time it's not 8 million. It's three. Skype 3.0, to be precise.

The beta (testing mode) version of Skype's free software is now available for your downloading delectation, and Skype's friendly techies are all ears for your thoughts on the new program.

Among the upgrades sported by Skype's latest incarnation are a more streamlined user interface, improved IT management, Click to Call and Skypecasting features – and plenty of bug fixes and technical improvements.

Jaanus has details of all v3.0's various tricks and treats on his Share Skype blog. If you're an experienced Skyper and fancy road-testing the new beta, click here to download and here for info on reporting bugs. You can also join the discussion on the forum.

If it's November 8, then it must be 8 million Skype users all in one go... now that's busy. And it's not even the weekend. Is this a new record?

And while we're on the subject of very big numbers, Skype now counts 136 million chat-happy people worldwide among its registered users. These merry Skypers are spread across 200 countires (are there 200 countries in the world? Name them all and I'll buy you a beer), and 250,000 new users sign up every day. We're gonna need a bigger boat...

WiFi Skype phones are among the most-wanted pressies on Christmas lists this year, according to retail megalith Amazon.

Skype is right up there with Doctor Who, Jamie Oliver and Deal Or No Deal among the magic names that'll be taking up the most space in Santa's bulging sack.

OK so the phones aren't quite at number one yet, but they grab a respectable 9th place, just behind such expensively-marketed heavyweights as iPods, Nintendo Wii consoles and electronic Tardises. And it beats Microsoft Office's student edition into 10th place.

Bill Gates was unavailable for comment. He's probably just sulking.

Continue reading "All I want for Christmas..." »

Belkin's Wi-Fi phone for Skype has finally touched down on UK shores, four longs months after it was first launched.

The phone's USP is that it can make Skype calls even when your computer is switched off, making it genuinely mobile – as long as you're in a WiFi hotspot. Sort of mobile, then.

Skype software is built into the handset, so you don't need to mess about downloading it, and it comes with WPA and WPA2 security. Snap one up now for £130 from Expansys.

First came pencil cases. Then came purses, alarm clocks, T-shirts, ankle socks and duvet covers. It was only a matter of time before the merchandising phenomenon that is Hello Kitty popped up on a Skype phone – and, whaddya know? She's done it just in time for Christmas. That cat's not stupid.

(I love Wikipedia's straight-faced description of Hello Kitty: "...characterized by a distinctive bow or some other decoration on her left ear, and the absence of a mouth.")

But don't get too excited, kitsch-fans. This decidedly un-macho gizmo from Perfectel, which comes bundled with Skype software, can only be bought from 7-Eleven stores in Hong Kong and Japan. The good news is that the phones only cost HK$128 (about £8.60), so, if you're really dedicated, an extra £500 for a ticket to Tokyo won't seem all that steep.

Life just gets easier and easier for eBaying Skypers. Skype's auction-giant partner has announced that it's expanding the number of categories in which sellers can add Skype Me buttons to their listings.

According to eBay, the recent trial of click-to-call buttons in auction listings has shown that buyers and sellers have "enjoyed the opportunity to resolve questions quickly and easily, while also improving trust in the process."

Skype for Pocket PC has been downloaded five million times worldwide since it was first rolled out in April 2004. The software allows Skypers to make free calls from any Windows Mobile Pocket PC handheld, as long as they're in a WiFi spot.

The latest version, Skype for Pocket PC 2.1, is currently supported by more than 60 devices from 20 different manufacturers – which should help to explain the huge uptake. Users in the US and Canada even get free SkypeOut to landlines and other mobile phones in North America until the end of the year. Nice!