Gizmo Project Beats Skype for Out Calls

Now that we're living in Vietnam, the who IP Phone thing is a lot more interesting. At first I thought I would just use my Cingular phone; gee it just works here, being GSM and all. Then I found out that it cost me $4.99 per minute for roaming in Vietnam. Ok, that's crazy expensive, but in Vietnam, it's crazy expensive. For $5 I can get a really good tennis pro for an hour or a decent meal. A taxi ride normally costs me less than a dollar. The really expensive coffee shop sells large lattes for less than $2 and the locals think we're nuts for pay that.

So the cheap solution seems to be to use Skype Out to call my friends on their phones back home. I've used Skype Out before and been pretty happy with it. I still have 6 € on my account from when we were visiting France back in February. So I download Skype onto my shiny new MacBook Pro and give it a try. No luck. I kept getting error #9407, whatever that means. Sure, I heard that Skype had a recent meltdown, but hey, that was supposed to be over.

Lucky for me, there is another option called Gizmo Project. It seems to be a Skype knock off but it has the distinct advantage of working from Vietnam, when Skype just gives out error #9407. Besides just working, Gizmo has some fun features. You can easily record your calls with Gizmo. Plus you can add your own sound effects during the calls. If you want to pretend to be an annoying radio DJ when calling your friends, Gizmo makes it easy.