A lot of the time I sit at my workstation and receive Skype calls from friends and would be clients. Sometimes its not practical to use the computer speakers and microphone on my MacBook, so I bought a Skype handset that runs on USB. Don’t like it. Firstly I don’t have enough USB ports on the Mac and secondly the cord sucks (it isn’t one of typical stretchy phone cords).

So I started wondering how it would be possible to get Skype on my cellphone? In South Africa a lot of the functionality of cellphones is stripped out by the networks so that they can milk us for those expensive cellphone calls, as well as data, so I wasn’t holding out much hope of finding a solution, but lo and behold, I discovered www.fring.com.

Basically Fring is an application for your phone that logs you into all your online chat services, such as Skype, AIM, GoogleTalk and a variety of SIP providers. Fortunately my phone (Nokia E65) also has wi-fi, so I can use that as an access point and enjoy all those services including Skype voice for only the cost of the data I am using via that access point. I can walk around the house and use my Skype service just as I would a regular cellphone service. Why, just this morning I called my buddy in Auckland New Zealand!

It’s also freed up some of my screen real estate because with Fring running on my phone I don’t even have to be logged into Skype on the Mac. If I am roaming out of the wi-fi range it will log me in whenever I am in range of another of my access points, so if I set up 3G/GPRS on the cell network as one of them I can make and receive Skype calls on the go at the cellular data rate.

Pretty cool stuff!

Recently

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.