Having spent three days with Nokia personnel based in Finland, my need to make calls to Finland on my Skype Unlimited World subscription has just increased. And with all the technology development going on in Israel (for instance, iSkoot's and Fring's developers are based in Israel), Israel becomes another high demand country for inclusion in Skype's various Unlimited subscriptions.

Today Skype announced the addition of Finland and Israel to their Unlimited subscription offerings. For instance they are now included at no additional charge to the various Skype Unlimited World, Unlimited Europe (20 countries with Finland as the only addition), etc. subscriptions. Finland and Israel are also included in the 36 countries serviced by an Unlimited Country subscription. (Mexico remains a 37th country special case.)

Additionally, administrators of Skype Business Control Panels can now purchase Skype Unlimited subscriptions for any employees, business colleagues and others whose Skype activity they administer.

With the ongoing 10,000 minute per month fair usage cap, I guess I'll have to reduce my time spent making calls to Chile and Estonia via SkypeOut. (10,000 minutes/month represents about five and a half hours/day.)

(Note: Links in this post will probably go to the pages for Canadian users; simply change your pages via the "change region" drop down box on the leading  Skype subscription page for each region.)

Tags: Skype, Skype Unlimited, Finland, Israel, iSkoot, Fring, Skype Business Control Panel

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Download the latest Skype 2.2 for Windows Mobile Premium (Pocket PC). No new features or bug fixes in this release.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent yesterday at a Nokia marketing event in Toronto and decided to only take my three mobile devices to see how I would deal with maintaining essential contacts and information flow (email, Twitter, Facebook, voice calls, web browsing) without having a full laptop available. The devices: a Blackberry 8820 (GSM/EDGE/WiFi), a Nokia N95 (WiFi only) and an iPhone 3G. For about 2 hours we were in a studio where there was video shooting. During this time I had to turn off the carrier radio as it could cause interference with the video equipment; yet all three devices continued to have WiFi access. So what did I accomplish during the entire day?

• Blackberry 8820: read and sent email via both GMail and Blackberry mail, received a Skype call via iSkoot, followed and submitted Twitter messages via Twitter4Skype running as a Skype chat session in iSkoot, checked out and tracked the Blue Jays game, used Google Maps to get to the Nokia event, made a couple of local phone calls.
• Nokia N95 (first model): demonstrated SlingPlayer Mobile and Qik.com to Nokia personnel; made a Truphone call to Minnesota, took photos of the event with 5 MP camera.
• iPhone: lots of high quality web browsing; follow Facebook activity, read GMail.

Each has its own virtues - especially the Blackberry QWERTY keyboard, the N95's video applications and the iPhone's web browsing experience; yet I could not have done all these activities on a single device. Having WiFi on all three devices helped maintain contact while not able to use the carrier's wireless services. Just as important is that I am still getting used to not having to worry about mobile data plan usage with Rogers' new 6GB/month data plan rates as a result of the iPhone launch three weeks ago - at a $30/month lower cost than my plans for 25MB/month two months ago.

But the "convergence" coup d'état of the day was carried out by iotum CEO Alec Saunders. He had to host his daily SquawkBox call from the hotel lobby using iotum's CalliFlower service. He followed the web page activity on his iPhone that had a WiFi connection to his Nokia E71 using JoikuSpot and the Rogers Wireless data service; he made the voice call into the session using his Blackberry over the GSM voice channel. Key here is the need to follow the web page while talking on, and listening to, the call.

Seems like there's still many paths to follow before we see total convergence on a single device.

Tags: Mobile life, Blackberry, Nokia, iPhone, Rogers, Alec Saunders, CalliFlower, SquawkBox, Joiku, twitter4skype, iSkoot, GMail, Facebook, Truphone, Qik.com, SlingPlayer

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a while since I've mentioned Skype Journal's editorial policies. They've been in effect since we started and all contributions to Skype Journal are subject to them.

1. Accuracy. Anything that purports to be non-fiction should be true. Which means it should be accurate in fact and in context.

2. Labeling and Sourcing. If we are not certain that something is accurate, we should either not publish it, or should make that uncertainty plain by clearly stating the source of this information and its possible limits and pitfalls. To take another example of making the quality of information clear, we believe that that if unnamed sources must be used, they would be labeled in a way that sheds light on the limits and biases of the information they offer.

3. Explicit Conflicts of Interest. The content of anything that sells itself as journalism should be free of any motive other than informing its consumers. In other words, it should not be motivated, for example, by the desire to curry favor with an advertiser or to advance particular political interest. On the other hand, much of the content of this site has at least one point of view. We reserve the right to let our contributors opine, so long as author biases or conflicts are explicit and on record.

4. Accountability. The contributors to this site hold ourselves as accountable as any of the subjects we write about. We are eager to receive complaints about our work, will investigate complaints diligently, and correct mistakes of fact, context, and fairness prominently and clearly.

5. Caveat Lector. Information contained here is from sources believed to be reliable. This information is not necessarily complete.

A note from Jim Courtney about our editorial independence from Skype:

While Skype serves as a primary focus of our coverage, at no time has Skype treated us with any favours or treatment beyond normal courtesies to the press.  Some third party Skype affiliates have done advertising with us but that, in no way, affects our editorial coverage. It is a matter of policy that anything that may be interpreted as a conflict of interest become transparent in a post.

What do you think?

Please let us know when we stray. We read everything sent to editor @ skypejournal.com.

Thanks.

Phil Wolff

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PC Magazine sponsored The Best (and Worst) Tech Support in America, a customer support satisfaction survey for VoIP service providers, among other categories.

Methodology: They surveyed PCmag readers who were also customers of Optimum Voice, Vonage [congratulations on the new CEO gig, Mr. Lefar], AT&T CallVantage, magicJack, Time Warner Cable digital phone, Comcast Digital Voice and Skype. Dashes indicate insufficient data for meaningful results.

Skype's ratings were within 10% of average. A little below on overall satisfaction, sound quality, connection reliability, and support for non-technical issues. A little above on ease of setup.

But there's a remarkable statistic at the bottom of the table. 

7% of SkypeOut users needed technical support vs. 2% of PC-to-PC users. This is an order of magnitude lower than the 25% of users from the other services. On SkypeOut that's 360% better, on PC-to-PC that's 1250% better.

Only 1 in 50 PC-to-PC Skype users ever need tech support. 1 in 4 for other other services.

How does Skype score so well with such a small support staff?

Design. Engineering. Testing.

"It just works."

More on Skype's designs to improve "Ease of Setup" soon.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)