As a point release, you shouldn't expect to find a ton of new features in Skype 3.8. Most of the changes are under the hood, but users should notice improved call quality, meaning fewer dropped calls, less delay, and less background noise. The new version should also do a better job of automatically configuring your firewall and router settings.
Skype has also hidden away user profile images from incoming requests. This might not sound like a big deal, but if you've ever received a request from someone with an avatar you'd rather not display on your work computer, this update could be a life saver.
Have friends, relatives, or business contacts located in faraway lands? Internet telephony company Skype is launching its first plan that lets you make unlimited international PC to telephone calls, assuming you're calling a landline in one of 34 countries covered by the plan.
Most of Europe is covered, as well as the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.The $9.95/month plan doesn't cover calls to cellphones in all areas, but you can call mobile phones in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Or you can just convince everybody you know to install Skype on their computers and mobile phones so you can make Skype to Skype calls for free.
VoIP company Jaxtr has added a new module that lets uses send free text messages to any cellphone from their Jaxtr homepage. There's no fee for sending the message, but if the recipient has to pay per message, you might want to think twice before sending dozens of messages a day. Unless you hate the person you're texting, of course.
We first covered Jaxtr way back in 2006 when the company released a tool for blogger and web publishers to embed a widget on their web sites that let visitors place calls to the web site author. You can also add a Jaxtr widget to social networking pages like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Orkut.
Honestly, we don't know too many people who want to take phone calls all day from visitors to their web sites or social networking profiles. But now that we've discovered the free SMS service, we can actually see ourselves using Jaxtr on a regular basis.
Internet telephony company GrandCentral was down for several hours this morning. That wouldn't be so bad if GrandCentral's business model didn't depend on telling users to give out their GrandCentral phone numbers instead of their cellphone, work, home, and other numbers. GrandCentral, which is owned by Google, provides a single number that can ring through to each of your phones. And most of the time it works brilliantly.
But GrandCentral is still in beta. And while we've grown used to Google's beta products being more stable than many companies' final release products, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a beta product goes down. And this morning, a lot of people were probably worried about missing phone calls because of the outage.
The service was restored by noon, Pacific time. But the fact that a "power issue" at a single facility could knock out GrandCentral phone service across the country is going to make us think twice before giving out our GrandCentral phone number from now on. Hopefully one of the things Google will do before taking the beta label off of GrandCentral is build some redundancy into the system to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
The Skype team has just released a new beta version of their internet telephony client for Windows. Skype 3.8 beta primarily focuses on audio quality improvements, with less background noise, less delay, fewer cut outs and dropped calls.
Skype 3.8 beta also uses a new UPnP framework, which should do a better job of automatically configuring your firewall and router settings. There's also a new extras manager and a bunch of bug fixes. The one known issue with this release is that you cannot send voicemails to users who have not authorized you.
While Call Graph certainly isn't the only Skype plugin that lets you record calls for free, it is certainly one of the simplest to use. And it's free, which always helps. Several other popular Skype recording applications like Pamela let you record up to 15 minutes for free, but you'll have to pony up some cash for a license if you want to record longer calls. There are no such limitations on Call Graph.
Here's how it works. You install Call Graph, and it will automatically record every call you make as a 128kbps MP3 file. You'll know it's working because a window will pop up letting you know the call is being recorded and asking if you want to stop the recording. You can also click the icon in the system tray to configure Call Graph so that it won't automatically record every call.
When a call ends, a window will pop up showing you a list of recent calls. You can play, rename, tag, or delete files from this window. There's also a search bar to find previous calls, which can come in handy as long as you've been diligent about adding tags.
Call Graph appears to be Windows only for now, and it's officially a public beta, although it seems to work pretty well.
Skype 2.0's biggest feature is support for video calls, which means you can do pretty much anything with the Linux version of Skype that you can do with the PC or Mac clients. That includes making PC to PC phone calls or video calls for free, or PC to telephone calls for a fee.
Packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, Xandros, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and CentOS.
Web telephony service Jaduka has launched a bunch of new tools that make it easy to initiate telephone to telephone calls over the web. The most basic service is called dukaDIAL, and it allows you to enter any two phone numbers to initiative a phone call. DukaDIAL will call one number and then the other and initiate a connection. No computer headset or microphone required. Jaduka doesn't charge anything for these calls, but your telephone provider might.
Jaduka offers several other services that use the same basic technology. For example, dukaBAR is a browser toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer. Once it's installed you can click a button and automatically detect any phone number on any web page. A telephone icon will show up next to those phone numbers, and if you click on that icon, Jaduka will initiate a phone call between your number and the number on the page. Skype offers a similar browser plugin, but with Skype you're making a PC to phone call, while Jaduka initiates phone to phone calls.
There's also a dukaBuzz widget which you can install on any web page to allow visitors to leave listen to voice comments, and a dukaLINK tool for creating clickable links that will initiate phone calls.
Startup Ribbit is preparing to launch in impressive looking internet telephony service in a few months. The company's Amphibian phone service provides a ton of features, but in a nutshell you could describe Amphibian as a cross between Google's GrandCentral and Skype with a few extra bits thrown in like an open developer platform and some social networking features.
Here's how it works. You can make calls from Ribbit.com or any website with an embedded Amphibian phone application. You will also be able to load up an Adobe AIR version of the software so you can make calls without firing up your web browser. You can see a list of received calls on the web, and you can see user profiles for missed or incoming calls if they're available.
But you can also link Amphibian to your other phone numbers of VoIP accounts. So if someone calls your home, work, or cellphone number or your Skype, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk account you can take the call using Amphibian.
Ribbit has also partnered with SimulScribe, a service that transcribes voicemail into text. This allows you to read or even search your voicemail. SimulScribe integration doesn't come free though. According to TechCrunch, Ribbit's business plan is to allow users to make PC to PC phone calls for free, but the company will charge a subscription fee for calls to telephones. Users who want to purchase additional services from third parties like SimulScribe will pay an additional fee, although we're sure some add-ons will be offered for free.
As of 12 AM PST, Pownce, the Twitter-esque social messaging tool created by Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka and Leah Culver, leaves private beta and becomes open to the public. Pownce became open to a limited group of users in June of 2007 and has thus far amassed 150,000 users.
Although the developer has repeatedly claimed that Pownce is "not a Twitter clone," it is hard to look at the two services and not see the similarities. Both offer a way to send a message to a large group of people at the same time and have similar friend/follower structures.
The differences are that while Twitter can be highly integrated with mobile devices and SMS messaging, Pownce can only be used from the web site or the Adobe AIR client. However, Pownce allows user the ability to share files (up to 10 MB for free users, 100 MB for Premium users), invitations and set-up personalized groups. When Pownce goes live, it will also make it easy to import friends from services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
Pownce's Main Messaging Page
Several of us here at DownloadSquad have been playing with Pownce on and off for quite some time, and while we think the service show considerable promise, Twitter still has our heart. The inability to use Pownce from an IM client or SMS outweigh the benefits of being able to share a file (we prefer e-mail or a link to a service like box.net anyway) or send out a group invitation. We do like the grouping feature and really wish that Twitter would implement somethign similar.
In the end, for us, it will all come down to what service our friends are using. As of right now, all of our friends are on Twitter; however, now that Pownce is open to the public, that could change. Check out Pownce and tell us what you think.
There are some signs that Skype VoIP software may be coming Sony's PSP. According to Sony's CES PR documentation, Skype is going to be available on the PSP. We tried to contact Skype's PR department for an official word, but they said "No comment at this time". We'll see what happens when CES kicks off this coming week.
For now, we can only rely on the fact that Skype is listed in the PSP's feature list on their site, as seen below.
We introduced you to Fring earlier this year, and now it has become even more useful. You've always been able to use Fring with Skype, Google Talk, Twitter, ICQ, and MSN Messenger; but now the application has the added ability to use AIM and Yahoo! Messenger.
Fring doesn't support voice calls on the new services, but does allow for IM conversations. You can, however, use Fring to make VoIP calls on Google Talk and Skype, along with Fring to Fring calls. With the new service additions, Fring is now a premier universal IM client for the mobile platform.
To use AIM or Yahoo!, simply load up Fring on your cellphone and go to settings -> services and add your AIM and/or Yahoo credentials to hop on those networks. No update to the Fring application is required.
In other Fring news, you can now connect with Free World Dialup (FWD) users using Fring.
Because Fring supports SIP, FWD can easily be used to connect via VoIP to your FWD friends. Details are a little sketchy on how to make mobile FWD calls, but details can be found on FWD's website. You will need to have a supported handset and your FWD# and password.
Note: you must have a Symbian or UIQ handset to utilize Yahoo/AIM.
PamFax, the Skype add-on we told you about a few months ago that lets you use Skype to send documents to fax machines has come out of beta. While in beta, the service was unavailable to US customers, but now that it has officially launched PamFax makes it easy to choose a Word or PDF document from your desktop and send it to any fax line in the world.
The application has a few other nifty new features, including the ability to work with Windows-compatible scanners. That means you can essentially turn your scanner into a fax machine by scanning an item directly to PamFax and then sending it off. There's also a PamFax print driver that lets you treat PamFax as a virtual printer. In other words, you can hit the print button in Word, Excel, Firefox, or any other application on your PC and sen the printout to any fax machine.
It costs about $.24 per page to send a fax, and you have to pay about $1.42 to sign up for the service the first time you send a fax. So if you happen to have a real fax machine lying around, it's probably going to be cheaper just to hook it up to your phone line. But for anyone who needs to send an occasional fax doesn't have a fax machine or a land line available, PamFax is a convenient, easy to use solution.
Skype has released a new build of Skype 2.7 beta for Mac. Probably the most important feature in the latest release is support for OS X 10.5 Leopard. But it looks like the Skype team is also continuing its march toward feature parity across the Mac, Linux, and PC versions of the popular internet telephony software.
A few months ago Skype launched high-res video support for video chat using the Windows client. When we say high-res, we don't mean HDTV resolutions, we're just talking plain old 640 x 480 pixel VGA resolution. But that's still a much sharper image than you'll get using the Linux or Mac versions of Skype, which only support 320 x 240 pixels.
Skype 2.7 beta for Mac is the first OS X build to support VGA video at 25 frames per second. If you've got a slower internet connection, you can also adjust your video settings.
We're guessing it'll be a while before we see VGA support for the Linux client, since Skype just got around to adding video to Skype 2.0 beta for Linux last month.
If desktop VoIP calling program Gizmo Project previously had a reputation as a Skype Killer, it's now official: Skype is dead. Gizmo has always done things Skype couldn't--like custom on-hold music, SIP compatibility, meta-IM with support for Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk, and a slew (that means dozens) of other things. Indeed, some of us here at Download Squad haven't had Skype in our startup items for a year or more.
Gizmo Project 4.0 beta just hit the wild. New in this edition are a reworked avatar system, tabbed text chatting, a totally redesigned user interface, and video calling, a feature that we got a first look at with an earlier beta release last month.
Ordinarily, Gizmo Project's creator, SIPPhone Inc., does a good job of getting features to their Mac and Linux editions in a hurry (though 4.0 beta isn't yet available for Mac). In this case, however, the Nokia N800/N810 version is also ready to rock, which really excites us, since Nokia's Internet Tablets have built-in cameras that are ideal for video calling.
As with previous versions of the Project, you can still make outgoing (and receive incoming) telephone calls, and make yourself reachable via a sipphone.com URI. So, with the last nail in Skype's coffin being hammered in by the good folks at SIPPhone, we're asking ourselves if we'll ever need to run Skype again. After all, with services like GrandCentral supporting Gizmo Project, and with the availability of a native Gizmo Project client for mobile phones, it looks like Gizmo Project is ready to bury eBay's redheaded stepchild.
As of 12 AM PST, 
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