For those who need to make phone calls the iTouch has always had one drawback. It is not a phone. The iPhone is. Now they are being drawn a little closer together because they can both use Skype.

Soon, what it will come down to is a question of attitude. In our illustration the bride in China is making a last minute Skype call. On an iTouch.

There are those who think a mobile phone is a trifle vulgar and intrusive and has disenfranchised the insane. (You do not believe the last bit? Think back. A few years ago if someone came to you down the street talking to themselves in a wild manner you gave them a wide berth knowing they were probably a few sandwiches short of a picnic. No longer. You now know that someone holding a daft conversation with space is probably making a mobile phone call. Which is unfair to those whose sanity is borderline.)

ITouch owners who tend to be obsessed with these devices — true also of iPhone users — possibly miss the ability to make calls. (Being able to receive calls may be viewed as a mixed blessing.) Now you can.

Voice over the Internet which is called VoIP, with the charge being led by Skype, is now available on both the iTouch, which needs it, and the iPhone for which it is an useful extra especially for the international traveler.

As this is being written a Skype phone call is going on in this office. It is with a journalist in Bangkok. It comes to a special Skype phone plugged into a computer through the USB port. It is clearer and easier to understand than a phone call from the same place on a mobile. This has been shown many times by actual test.

What follows is difficult to believe but hang in there. The quality of Skype calls is so high that there was a spate of difficulties. That was because in the pauses between conversations the line sounded so clear that users felt they had been disconnected. So Skype recorded sound which happens during the so-called silences of  long distance calls and artificially included it in Skype. Now, when two users are not actually talking there is a gentle, mild crackling noise exactly like a long distance call so that both users feel they are both still connected.

TruPhone said at Macworld that its mobile VoIP service for the iPhone and the iTouch will bring in Skype.

This starts January 12 when you will be able to do Skype-to-Skype calling and messaging. To do this TruPhone appears to be positioning itself as an aggregation portal for voice and instant messaging.

The TruPhone portal integrates the ability to make low-cost international calls over Wi-Fi or cellular, and it integrates IM functionality from MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. It also has Twitter.

Of course, to take advantage of this service you have to be in a wireless hot spot and whether that will cost you money or not depends on where you are. In a sense that is not desperately important as wireless expands by the day. What IS important is that, in one sense, this makes the iTouch on a par with the iPhone.

But the iPod costs less. How much less is not easy to divine. Say an unlocked Apple iPhone 3G with 16GB costs US$777 on eBay you have a working figure without going into mobile operators’ plans which are very difficult to sort out. An iTouch is going to cost you half of that. And it is slimmer, neater and, indeed, quite the article.

True, you cannot make or take ordinary mobile phone calls on it. Some people would count this as a blessing.

Related:

Two iTouches are better than one

iPod Skype due February

iPod Touch could be big challenger for iPod

Skype coming to the iPhone [next week]

Google says Apple killed Voice app

Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 8:56 pm under International, Internet, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

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