October 1st, 2005
Gizmo: The New (Skype Killer) Kid In Town
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
I have been writing about Skype since it launched. VoIP or (using your PC to make phone calls) went from novelty to serious business pretty quickly thanks in my opinion to the superior voice quality of Skype. Skype saves my company about $10K a month in international calling, and it probably made Plantronics and Logitech rich with all the USB headsets we alone bought, and it allowed my parents to chat with my sister in France, and me in San Francisco all for free.
But the best and scariest thing about the tech world is that there is always a swimming shark just waiting to attack, and today, that shark is a little piece of freeware called Gizmo. It’s free, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it looks pretty much like Skype. I will field test it with our international folks on Monday and write back about the quality, but here’s the bottom line:
What to Know: eBay OVERPAID for Skype, Gizmo is cool and worth a try, and VoIP is quickly becoming like instant messaging. You end up having a bunch of IM clients and now an additional slew of VoIP clients and someone will probably do a combo roll-up like Trillian to help out, but it looks like this is one category with many many players and no clear winner unless eBay can figure out how to get some money from its purchase.
Dowload Gizmo Here (via Digg)
David Johnston says:
I’m sticking with Skype. It works for my purposes quite well and none of the features that Gizmo has are enough to make me really that tempted.
October 1st, 2005 at 12:16 pm
Mike says:
Is this like Skype, where while you have it in your tool, tray it can use your bandwidth? Not much, but it does use it.
That above is the main reason I wont keep Skype running, and I have only 1 contact in it
Friendly person aren’t I :p
Mike
Can I sue them? They used my cat’s name, and she had it first.
October 2nd, 2005 at 3:41 am
BillBC says:
Do we need another Skype? Why, unless it has better features? It was hard enough getting my friends, some of whom are not very computer-savvy, to get used to Skype. I don’t want to go through that again unless there’s some compelling reason to do so. What are the advantages of this new program?
October 2nd, 2005 at 9:10 pm
Mateo says:
I use SkypeOut to call phones in other countries.
Gizmo has a Call Out, but it’s rates are more than 4 times as expensive, so I’m not interested at all.
October 3rd, 2005 at 12:27 pm
Thor says:
Ah Hell NO.. Yall should Stick to Skype, it cost less, Gizmo is like twice/three times expensive…. and I cant find some features that skype has.. in Gizmo……..So I say Skype! “S”
October 4th, 2005 at 10:28 am
Tom Foale says:
Why would I switch to Gizmo when my friends and colleagues use Skype? And that’s going to be just about everyone’s attitude..
You should have a look at VoIPBuster, it offers free calls to PSTN in some countries. Seems to change a bit though. You meed to register with real money to make the free calls though. I still wouldn’t use it, I don’t need to save money that much and no-one is using it yet.
October 4th, 2005 at 1:27 pm