Most people think of a messaging program as something where you sit in front of your computer with 10 windows open, typing to all your friends. There are many clients – like MSN, Yahoo, AIM, IRC, and Jabber – which can handle this, and all do it in pretty much the same way. Skype is a messaging program with a huge twist – you can voice chat with your friends and actually be understood! Some of the other clients integrated voice chat into their programs, but in reality, they were designed as text-based chat, and the voice features never really caught on. A major problem with these programs was clarity: you had to ask the person to repeat themselves several times to understand them. Also, these features were not very user friendly.

Skype is different from the other major clients because it is voice-based from the ground up, and has a text feature built into it – allowing the developers to focus on and design some awesome voice-based features. It has support for Skype-to-Skype voice chat, Skype-to-Skype text chat, conference calls, regular outgoing phone calls, and many other features that will be detailed more later. Skype can be downloaded here. The base program is free, but some of the extra features are not. Check out their site for details.

This client is simply awesome. The voice chat works flawlessly. You can talk with other Skype users online by simply adding them to your contact list and starting a call – working very similar to a cell phone. Their website boasts “If you will bear with us for a moment here we’d like to share some technical stuff with you: with normal telephones you can only hear sounds from 300 Hz to 3 kHz. Not so with Skype; We’re all over the spectrum, from the lowest hum to the highest screetch.”



Another cool feature is support for conference calls. It is an extremely useful feature, and Skype makes it very easy to do. This feature is useful for business people or those who just want to talk to several friends at once. Again, it is integrated very nicely into the overall interface in the program – and it works. Most clients have trouble handling one-way voice connections, but with Skype, you can handle as many as your computer will allow.



Also included in the package is a Skype-to-Phone feature called SkypeOut, which allows you to call a regular phone number from your PC, without using VoIP. It is said to work extremely well, but it does cost $0.02 per minute within the U.S. This is the only slight disadvantage I could find in the program, and even at 2 cents per minute, it is still cheaper than most long distance plans or cell phone providers.

For those of you who may be saying “Gee, this sounds like a great plan, but what if someone wants to call me on Skype? Could I use it as a regular phone for incoming calls, too?” The answer is yes. A beta feature of Skype, called SkypeIn, allows you to get your own number – up to ten of them, actually – in whatever location you wish. This way, when someone calls your new Skype number, goes right to the Skype client on your computer. Their site warns, though, that they are not a telephony replacement, and can not be used for emergency calls. This feature also comes with Voicemail included, and costs around $40 per year.

The overall design of Skype is very user friendly, clean, and easy to use. It uses a generic, messenger-like skin that is similar to most of the other clients. From the options menu, you can create hotkeys, set up notifications, edit your personal profile, and tweak many other settings.



Memory usage on Skype is very acceptable – running with around 16 MB of RAM. For an application like this, that may seem like a lot, but with the features it includes, I found this program to be worth the space.
There are many features in Skype that make the program worth your time to check out. I highly recommend it to all users – home, business, and corporate. It is an awesome package!

Thanks to Matt Johnson for suggesting this program for review.