Skype have now introduced premium phone and data capabilities if you have the latest version. Funnily enough their blog post doesn’t mention anything about it being great for those who want to host their own “personal video chats” or voicechats for a charge – instead it focuses on the use for support calls and such like……. I’m not convinced this will be the number one use for the technology, after all I think i’d spend more time talking someone through setting up a beta version of skype than I would solving their problem – although it would stop people asking me for free support – I could just tell them to call me on my skype number after they’ve worked out how to install it 😉

You can get another 10 mins of skypeout by signing into skype. They are going to be doing more of these days and you need to watch the share skype blog for more details.

Skype are doing a decent bonus in that if you sign up for $10 or 10euros worth of skype out minutes (or voicemail) then you get 3 months of voicemail free and 2 hours of skypeout credit if you pay by credit card. I now only have .06euro’s left in my account after our first $10 purchase so I am about to renew. The annoying thing is that most of the people in the uk don’t have skype although I had a great 100 minute conversation about the church website this morning over skype for free 🙂

Today is a free skypeout day so you can get 10 minutes of free calls. Sign into Your Account to claim the minutes. Ironically you may have to wait 24 hours until you get it yet they encourage you to use it to tell your friends about the promotion.

Rather than paying the 10cents a minute on our current US phone provider to ring my sister in the uk I signed up for the skypeout service this afternoon. The annoying thing is that you have to pay 10euros up front but that gets you a rate of 1.1p/minute to us,uk,australia etc. So the 37 minute phone call cost about 40p. compare that to the 3 minute phone call on BT that she made to me at 27p. The quality was excellent – no different to a normal phone. The only downside is I don’t have a cordless headset whereas I do have a cordless phone so I had to sit at the computer, but that means you can look at web pages at the same time.
Now if only she would sign up for skype herself – then it would be totally free (apart from the 10euro’s I’ve just spent in prepaid time that unfortunately expires. That will however will probably come in handy for calling my parents and other non-broadband enabled uk technophobes)

There’s a new version of skype that was released yesterday (which probably solved the audio hassles I was having!) The auto update function of skype doesn’t detect that a new version is available to download so you will need to download it yourself.

There is a bug in skype in that if your config.xml contains the value 256 in the MicVolume then your voice is VERY VERY quiet. Changing it to 255 with notepad,saving the file and then launching skype again means you get crystal clear sound again. So if you have skype then let me know! Thanks to the various postings in the skype forum – I’ve spent several hours trying to work this one out.

The latest beta, released on thursday now has the ability to export contacts and also to download your contact list from their server. Probably the #1 bugbear that people complain about. Download Skype for Windows page has all the information you need.