Feb 23, 2006

It lives! (finally making calls with JabPhone)


Well, I finally got JabPhone to work. Or rather I should say JabPhone finally started working. It seemed they had some severe teething problems in the beginning, and then worked with Google to make better use of the google federated jabber servers. After that they advertised that everything was back on-line and even gave us early adopters a $1 bonus to our accounts (err..., wow?)

But for me it still did not work. Or rather calls went through once in about five attempts. That was a week ago. Todays test worked first time. Voice quality was good, not as good as pure GoogleTalk, but better than SkypeOut (at least my last few calls with SkypeOut have been rather poor).

My overall impression is that it is heading in the right direction, but has a long way to go. It is not nearly as polished a product as SkypeOut, and having to initiate the call with a text message is a minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nevertheless. No dialpad is more serious. I view this as an alpha level service. I am a bit surprised it is 'on the market'. Hopefully they get it dramatically polished up before it develops a negative image.