Siemens Sells Skype Adapters For Wireless Phones

prostoalex writes "In a recent Slashdot story on Skype CEO interview some comments expressed displeasure with the fact that you have to be tied up to your computer to make those VOIP calls via Skype. Not anymore - this adapter from Siemens plugs into the USB port of the computer and allows Siemens Gigaset S645, Gigaset S440/445 or Gigaset C340/345 phone models to use the Skype connection instead of landline. News.com has the story."

This is a story?

[Breakfast Pants]

There are several products that do exactly this with regular household handsets and with standard VOIP programs. Why is this news just because Skype is doing it? Oh yeah, Skype rhymes with hype. I see the connection.

really missed the point

[frovingslosh]

I think they really missed the point. What the educated user wants is a box that you plug your phone into one end, and that you plug the other end into your Ethernet router. Not something that you have to plug into a USB port on a computer.

Heck, at almost no extra cost it could even include a small router(that could be disabled), so if the customer doesn't already have a router they just plug their computer into the box rather than the other way around. This just makes sense on so many levels, where as using a USB connection through a computer (and the required software that must go along with it) is really ugly.

Re:This is a story?

[Breakfast Pants]

Look: my comment was perhaps a little short and perhaps I'm a little snappy about astroturfing and copy and pasted press releases. But to mod it "offtopic" makes no sense. Its certainly ontopic. It might look at first glance like flamebait or troll, but I cannot conceive of how even at first glance it would look offtopic.

Re:IM through Cell phone...

[GreatBunzinni]

The thing about SMS is that you pay a fee for the delivery of the message. That isn't the case in any internet IM service. And that's the beauty of it: communicating through your cell phone free of charge. It may not be groundbreaking news but it is a heck of a lot cheaper, which is always good.

Re:Skype is Number One!

[Bitsy Boffin]

Skype is about marketing, sure thier product might not be as good as existing ones, sure it might flaut standards and use a proprietry protocol, sure it doesn't do this and that... but the long and the short of it is that Skype is getting the mass market attention.

If you think you can do better, well, go for it I look forward to seeing "glomph-o-phone" take the world by storm.

But I think a better focus of your attention would be towards skype, extending it via thier API, and pressuring them into making thier core system better/more open because I don't see Skype going away any time soon. "Skype Me" is going to become the next "Google It" whether you like it or not.

Missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the current comments, I think the point that a lot of people are missing is that Skype isn't just a another VoIP service provider but due to it's SkypeOut service, it also allows a lot of us people internationally to call landlines from our PCs at highly discounted rates with amazing sound quality (and the service just improves as more people use it since it's based on a P2P protocol). Using hardware like that available at www.phoneconnector.com I can now pick up my 2.4 Ghz wireless phone and make calls to other friends who happen to use Skype or calls to landlines internationally at amazing rates. The great thing is it even works with dialup so as a heavy international traveller, due to business, I can make amazingly cheap calls to whoever I want in the world (landline or otherwise) with just skype on my laptop wherever I may be (at an airport in transit, hotel, or even just sitting in the park near a wireless hotspot). Skype has reduced the phone bills of many people, myself included, to almost 25% of what they used to be.

For everyone posting "better" alternatives...

[tuxedobob]

(To Skype itself, not the accessory.)

It must meet these, Skype's current basic functions:

1. Be able to use a computer microphone/headset.
2. Be able to use Mac or Linux also.
3. Be able to call for free another user (not out to traditional phone).
4. Be able to call a traditional phone (for a fee: 1.7 cents/min in US and most of Europe, I think).

I'm very tempted to give up my cell phone over this. We have no landline phone here, either. My wife has a cell phone, just in case.

(Side note: why doesn't /. allow the cent sign (AKA option-4)?

Re:Has anyone here ever played...

[danwarne]

I can see a day when your ISP will link to another ISP via Wi-Max (or an equivelant tech), and another ISP, and another... creating an independant Internet not reliant on a wired and "restrained by Big Brother" infrastructure. This already happens, in Australia, at least. Here, we have a particularly dominant carrier - Telstra - that owns the very great lion's share of the country's telecom infrastructure. As a result, peering 'internet exchanges' (IXs) have been set up in every state, which serve as central points for ISPs to exchange data with each other directly rather than their upstream providers.

Re:Don't hype Skype

[adolf]

Right.

The world would be far better off if everyone installed Linux on a spare computer so they could run Asterisk [asterisk.org]. You then just need to buy a bunch of hardware [digitnetworks.com], and then either spend a few hundred dollars each on WiFi phones, or spend tens of hours recabling your house.

Oh, and then you get to configure the mess, after learning all about such eccentricities as G.711, G.723.1, GSM, IAX, and SIP, SCCP, plus a whole lot of other defacto telephony standards and Ways Of Doing Things that were obviously developed in a cave.

Once you solve the echo problem [voip-info.org], all you gotta do is make DUNDi [dundi.com] work, and you can finally call other people Just Like You. Or, you can sign up with any of dozens of shady small VOIP telephone companies and pay a few tenths of a cent per minute to talk to regular people via a SIP, IAX, h.323, or MGCP connection.

Sweet.

Alternatively, one could always download and install Skype. I understand that it does work fairly well, and is easy for mere mortals to use. It seems that Siemens now has an easy way for you to use their handsets with it. Neat.

Re:This is a story?

[Zorilla]

- Inflexible: only supports 8khz 8-bit audio.

This one is debatable - when I call my parents over Skype and they use their Pentium 3 machine, the calls are lower quality, probably around 8 kHz, but when they use their much faster laptop, the calls are a much nicer 44 kHz. Since Skype handles most configuration itself (validating their "it just works" attitude), I can only assume it's dropping the sample rate because the slower computer can encode fast enough.