iSkoot links cellphones with Skype

Don't have a WiFi enabled phone and feeling left out of the whole VoIP telephony thing? Well, if you're a Cingular customer and have a Series 60 phone, today might just be your lucky day. iSkoot's announced a new service that will allow Cingular customers to use Skype without using any kind of data connection. Once you install iSkoot's app on your phone, you can use your existing voice connection to connect to their gateway, which in turn links you in to Skype. We know this may sound complicated but it's actually pretty straight forward; if you notice the diagram, you'll see that all of these connections are made by utilizing the latest in smoke-cloud-and-arrow technology. With plans of releasing this software for more platforms (Series 40,  RAZR, and Treo at first) and adding support for more services like Google Talk, we can see iSkoot's products becoming very useful -- who couldn't use a break in their international long distance bills?

[Via Personal Tech Pipeline]

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 4:07PM]

Very interesting, better then paying the LD fees of Cingular.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 4:07PM]

Very interesting, better then paying the LD fees of Cingular.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 4:26PM]

So a series 60 razor can now go wifi...but itunes is capped at 100 songs...looky looky..no touchy touchy...what's next

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 5:17PM]

If only data was so exspensive, then we wouldnt need all this smoke and arrow technology...

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 6:08PM]

Doesn't this:

http://www.skypemart.com/direct/skypeusa/itemdetl.jsp?prod=2917

do the same thing?

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 6:15PM]

I guess there is some value in you paying these guys instead so your cheapskate friends paying $5/month for skypein. For international calling it would be a winner. Either way you are burning your $0.10 minutes. I would be much more interested in paying for unlimited data (cingular $60) and turn that into unlimited VOIP minutes.

If someone could take the GSM voice codec packets over EDGE to a facility (low CPU usage in the handset) and transcode them to SIP or Skype and trigger received calls from SMS so the TCP/IP doesn't have to active to receive it would be perfect.

There's youre billion dollar buisness plan (until G3 becomes reality). Please remember me fondly (or better yet send stock).

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 18th 2006 8:24PM]

smoke-cloud-and-arrow technology -That's funny! I love it!

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 12:13AM]

Its the end of the road for a lot of long distance (international) phone companies.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 6:02AM]

Does anybody know if this only works with Cingular???

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 6:56AM]

Atul - its the end of the road for long distance companies for many reasons, this is just one.

Voipme - sort of, this is a service which presumably works anywhere. This means you do not have to be in the local calling area of your home phone. But thanks for posting that link as it will work for what I want to use it for.

General: The Cingular unlimited data plan is $45.00/month for business plans, and $60.00 for normal plans (I believe). Personally I use IM clients like ICQ/Skype or more correctly Trillian and Skype because of the real-time status that they give me. I do not have to wonder if I can reach someone, I can see whether or not they are online and 'reach out and touch someone'. So it would be worth it to me (I have an unlimited data plan) to have a real client. I see the real value of this however in international calling (a bigger cloud, longer arrows).

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 7:09AM]

I have installed, and it works very nice. I'm in Spain and to call thru Skype it makes a call to the US. In the future I'm sure that this service will have local nodes. This is the future.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 11:35AM]

Isn't the latency, particularly the cloud to cloud variety, a problem?

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 19th 2006 4:25PM]

i dont think circuit switched networks are clouds in the schematic world. They need a tower, a co, and a tandem at least.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 20th 2006 1:28AM]

I am now using USB skype gateway that I bought for $60, and it does more than iskoot, plus I don't have to subscribe to any data service for my cellphone. the skype gateway is called TomMade tellerbox. Hope it helps

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 20th 2006 8:54AM]

I don't understand the technology that restricts it to Cingular users. If you are just calling the circuit switched network, why won't it accept calls from other carriers?

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 20th 2006 10:46PM]

I installed the new Skype Client on my Nokia 6620 today, and had no difficulty configuring it to connect to my Skype account and use Skype Out to call my best friend in Switzerland. Very cool! My only request is that the client utilize the phone book in the phone so that I don't have to lookup and manually enter phone numbers into it. Beyond that it works just great on my Cingular connection.

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