Get unlimited international calls with Skype’s new plan
Friday, April 25th, 2008
With half my family living halfway around the world, I quickly embraced Skype, the program (or if you want to get technical, Voice Over Internet Protocol) that allows you to talk to other Skype users over your computer, for free. In fact, I’m always amazed that more of my friends and family haven’t signed up… it’s almost like they don’t want to chat to me for hours or something.
Anyway, despite Skype calls being free to other Skype users, if you wanted to use your account to call landlines or mobile phones in the past, you would still have to pay - and the cost would depend on the length of the call and where you were calling. But no more! Skype’s new calling plan aims to encourage more people to pick up the service, and it sounds like a bargain to me.
Pay just $9.95 per month and you can make an unlimited number of calls to landlines in 34 countries, including the United States, Canada, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. Calls to cells in the US and Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore and also included.
With Skype phones now meaning you don’t even need to be connected to your computer to make a call, I hope all you holdouts will be rushing to sign up when this new service is made available on Monday.
Via USA Today.
Alright, we get it. SED actually is not the wave of the future for televisions, but OLED most probably is. At present, we’ve got Sony, Toshiba, Samsung and LG Display (among others) all vying for your future dollars, and since competition in the HDTV space is so grand for consumers, we won’t be kvetching too much about yet another entrant. DigiTimes has it that Matsushita (parent company of Panasonic) is looking to begin production of OLED displays “in the future.” That’s it. No juicy clues as to when, no inside information about panel sizes — nothing. Just enough to tease you and leave you in a state of panic for the foreseeable future.
Never one shy to pick a fight, Comcast is now taking square aim at AT&T, which it alleges is wreaking havoc with its internet service as a result of shoddy installs of the company’s U-verse TV service. More specifically, as Ars Technica points out, while both companies use different lines outside of the home (copper coax for Comcast and twisted pair for AT&T), they each use the same coaxial wiring inside the house, which Comcast says causes “feedback” to leak back out onto its network, possibly as a result of the two services using similar frequencies or filters. That, Comcast says, has caused service disruptions for some 20,000 users in the Chicago area, with it particularly affecting those that mix and match Comcast and U-verse services. To put a stop to that, Comcast is now seeking a restraining order against AT&T, although it apparently hasn’t received one as of yet. For its part, AT&T not only unsurprisingly says that “the suit lacks merit and that the company intends to vigorously fight it,” but that it plans to significantly ramp up the roll out of U-verse in Illinois.
The Spoon Scale is probably going to be on the Christmas gift list of many drug dealers, because instead of having to carry a normal scale to measure the product, they can simply do it with a spoon that weighs 90 grams.
