Dan Warne21 July 2006, 12:47 AM
The Skype competitor Gizmo Project is offering free calls to any landline phone in Australia, as well as 59 other countries.
VoIP provider SIPphone has launched a promotion which offers free calls to any landline in Australia, as well a 59 other countries.
SIPphone is even offering free calls to mobiles in some countries, including Canada, China, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, USA and others.
The free calling offer is available through SIPphone's Skype-like software client called Gizmo.
The only catch in the promotion is that you have to be an "active Gizmo user" and get your contacts to sign up for Gizmo and add their PSTN numbers to their Gizmo profile.
Gizmo is similar to the Skype client but considerably more feature-rich, including features like call recording and voicemail that are extra cost add-ons for Skype. It's available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.There's even a version for the Nokia 770 internet tablet.
Gizmo Project is also the first instant messaging network to be fully interoperable with Google Talk, so you can text-chat with Google Talk contacts via Gizmo without having to sign up for a Google Talk account yourself (and vice versa).
Gizmo started out as a VoIP client that was more standards-compliant than Skype: it uses industry-standard SIP protocols. However, it attracted criticism because despite using SIP, it could only connect to the SIPphone network.
The new version 2.0 can also connect to third-party Asterisk servers, allowing you to setup a VoIP PABX in the office and use Gizmo as a front-end.
For Mac users, there's a plugin for Adium which provides all the functionality of Gizmo via Adium.