Is Gizmo better than Skype?

Rich Pav General

(Forward: If I were to talk about what I’ve been doing lately, I’d bore you all to tears. I’m thinking about recoding all those little stories of my life I tell people when we’re getting to know each other. Know what I mean? Like the drug deal that went bad in Bolivia, or that crack whore in Phoenix who turned out to be my ninth grade art teacher.)

Gizmo Project is a VoIP (voice over IP) app similar to Skype. The two main differences that come to mind are that Gizmo has a recording fuction built into it and it uses an open standard VoIP (called SIP if you’re interested) so it’s compatible with other hardware and software that also use it.

Recently, they’ve made it possible to place international calls to landlines and mobile phones in selected countries for free. Of course there’s a catch, but it’s reasonable. The person you want to call needs to download Gizmo, create a user profile and enter their landline or mobile phone number into their profile. After that, they don’t need to use Gizmo at all.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume it’ll work, I can’t think of anything stopping me from creating a Gizmo account on my parents’ behalf so I can call them for free.

Rich Pav

Richard has been living in Japan since 1990 with his wife and two teenage sons, Tony and Andy.

15 thoughts to “Is Gizmo better than Skype?”

  1. Do your parents need to have an actual computer? Or can you simply enter their phone number into an account you create on your computer, in Japan?

    1. I think he’s talking about creating an account for them.

      If i’m not mistaken you can use Gizmo to find other people to chat with. It’s more focused on social networking rather than personal voice calls. I haven’t tried it yet.

      Just want you to know that I check my “Live Bookmarks” every day for updates. Have you noticed a drastic traffic decrease due to the infrequent updates, or do you still have people like me who check it religiously?

    2. I need to test it, but I don’t see why I can’t simply create an account for them that includes their phone number so I can call them for free.

  2. Kyle I don’t know if Rich has had a traffic decrease but, if he does, it shure ain’t because of me.

    Rich I still check out Herro Flom japan on a daily basis.
    I’m one of your many hopeful listeners that dream of a “Retun to podcasting” on your part. Like Dick Clark use to say on American Bandstand “ONE MORE TIME”:)

    1. Once the site I’m developing for work is finally finished and goes live, I’ll start podcasting again. It might take another month.

  3. Skype is still it and growing. Their deal to call N. America is still good to the end of the year (work around your IP and you should be able to do it from there).

  4. I miss my existential bullshit! Get it together man; my mind depends on it. You neglect the public.

  5. I haven’t noticed much of a quality difference between Skype and Gizmo. And I haven’t had the need to call a landline phone so I can’t really talk about that, but it sounds like a good deal.

  6. I am hearing more and more about skype but I have not used it. will it work with apple computers ?

  8. the thing about Gizmo is that the contact you want to call (his landline number) must be online, you cant create accounts and call them if they are offline

  9. Is it true it will support yahoo, hotmail and other accounts?
    If so, it’ll be much better than skype because the latter requires a new skype account..!

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