Gizmo - mo better VoIP for your mobile

I never did post part 2 of my VoIP posting. Suffice to say I found a good VoIP solution called Gizmo and have been using it quite heavily for several months now. Actually the VoIP connectivity is provided by a company called SipPhone - you can sign up with them independently of Gizmo. Gizmo is actually an open source project to provide clients and services layered on top of VoIP and you can use any SIP based VoIP provider, not just SipPhone.

The Gizmo client works well and is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows. It also talks to most of the IM providers too like Yahoo, MSN and Google, and they area also about to add video support (currently in beta on Windows).

The latest innovation to come from GizmoProject is Gizmo for your mobile phone. Now this does what you're thinking - lets you place VoIP calls from your mobile, but not how you think it would. It is not a VoIP client, it is actually a little Java (J2ME) application that runs on your phone and it makes a call from your cellphone to a remote number in an interesting way...

It actually takes your mobile phone number and the number you want to call and initiates two VoIP calls from a remote server - one to your mobile, and the other to the number you want to dial, and then it connects them together. Both ends get an incoming call that look like they are from your cellphone and you're both connected to each other... The clever part is you end up paying standard Gizmo rates for the call to your mobile from the USA and the call to the other end (you are also liable for any cellphone airtime minutes charged for receiving the call).

This may not sound very useful but it is - it means you can make international calls from cellphone for a pitance. For instance if I want to call the UK then normally T-Mobile would charge me $1.00 or more a minute - if I use Gizmo for Mobile then I end up paying 1.95 cents a minute for the call to me, and 1.95 cents for the call to the UK for a total of 3.9 cents a minute. Assuming I'm within my cellphone plan minutes allotment there is no airtime charge to pay T-Mobile. Brilliant!

Because the application is J2ME based it runs on a very wide variety of phones and requires very little resources unlike standard VoIP clients. So you don't need a fancy Windows Mobile or other smartphone to use it - any J2ME supporting phone (which is nearly all these days) will run it. You will also have to have a cellphone plan that lets J2ME apps access the Internet - usually called a "Web access" plan or something like that. But since it transfers very little data that shouldn't cost much if anything. It is well worth it if you are going to make any International calls.

Now all I want is the ability to do the same thing from a web browser to my regular land line. I know there are other ways to achieve the same thing - by calling an access number to make a VoIP call, but kicking off the call from a regular web browser would be much cooler and would avoid any outgoing charges.