So last night, Zach was asking me about my experiences with Skype on an iPod Touch. I was going back and forth over whether I’d recommend it or not and decided to write up a post about the Pros and Cons of having an Faux iPhone.
SkypeOut is insanely cheap. For $2.95 a month, I can make as many calls as I need. Although I only really need to make about 5-10 calls through Skype… I typically use whatever landline is next to me.
So, I’ve got a second-gen iPod Touch. I was able to upgrade it to the latest version of the iPhone OS, iOS 4. Unfortunately, the second-gen iPod Touch doesn’t have support for multitasking. The processor in the third-gen iPod is the same as the iPhone 3GS, an underclocked ARM Cortex-A8, which is why they’ve dubbed the iPod third-gen beefy enough to run multitasking.
Apple’s stance seems to be that second-gen iPods wouldn’t be fast enough to provide a good user experience. IMHO, I think they just didn’t feel like supporting an older platform. There are times when the keyboard doesn’t feel responsive… I’ll go to a text input field and have to wait just a little too long before I can either start typing or the letters I’ve typed register in the field. :-/ Also, whenever I plug in my Griffin iTrip Auto (charge and FM), I find that there’s a delay when I try to open up the music app to play a podcast. There are just little glitches where the software seems hung every now and again to make me regret upgrading to iOS4.
Don’t get me wrong, I like having folders… I guess… kinda. That’s about the only new feature that I see. Oh yeah… I can also do multiple exchange accounts, which makes it handy for me to be able to check both my gmail and my work exchange account. I get little dings when I have incoming emails with certain labels or in certain folders.
Anyways, I’m digressing from the original focus of this post. I was going to talk about Skype on the iPod Touch. I wish I had a multitasking iPod so I could leave the Skype App running in the background, but I’ve also read people complaining that running Skype in the background drains the battery a bit more quickly, which kinda writes it off for being a phone. What good is a phone when the battery dies in 6 hours. :-/
Running Skype on a non-multitasking iPhone is about as convenient as having to leave your chat client fullscreen to get incoming chats. :-/
That being said, I’ve got a solution that works for me. Over the weekend of the 4th, Steve & Jimmy were still half-impressed and half-baffled as to how I could go so long without a cell phone. It’s not that I don’t have a phone number. I’ve had a google voice account for a long time, so I have voicemail and an avenue to send and receive text messages.
This isn’t as useful because I have to have wifi access to be able to send SMS messages. I’m not going to be walking around, out and about, able to receive texts, which I guess is both a good and bad thing. Sending me a text that you’re running 30 minutes late only helps if the place I’m at has free wifi. In Austin, that’s rarely much of a problem… Driving down the highway, it’s definitely much more of a problem.
It works for me because I spend 95% of my time with a computer and landline right next to me. If you wanna get a hold of me, call my google voice number and it rings my office during the day, my house in the morning and evenings, and goes straight to voicemail sunday through thursday… A guy’s gotta get some sleep. Everyone who needs to get in touch with me has my email address, my google voice number to SMS me, and also knows the phone numbers to my office and my house.
It’s a VERY rare occasion that I need a cell phone. I guess when I got a flat in the pickup truck I borrowed when we were moving last summer, but how often does that happen. I ended up just walking towards a nearby gas station and discovered that Schlotzsky’s had free wifi. So I stood outside a Schlotzsky’s and SMS’d a few people for help. No big deal.
I don’t think I could recommend Skype as a full replacement for a cell phone. I think I’m going to try this other idea I saw, which was buying a disposable pay-as-you-go type of phone and linking that phone number up with google voice. When someone calls my google voice number, it rings that phone as well as any other lines you have setup. If I happen to lose the phone or just want to be dramatic and throw the phone in the lake, I just have to go buy a new phone and setup a new number tied to google voice. I think that’d be a bit more useful as an emergency phone than any sort of cost saving measures using Skype.
That being said, I think when Erin and I take our trip, I’m going to try to take advantage of our Skype To Go number, which gives you a local number when you’re abroad that routes to a set of preconfigured phone numbers… ya know for calling home to tell everyone how much fun we’re having or what’s going on.
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