Who is the King of Free Talk, Skype or Gizmo?

By David Walker | January 18th, 2006 (0) Comments

Tom’s Networking takes a good look at Skype and Gizmo to see who comes out as the “King of Free Talk.” As expected, the guys at Tom’s Networking gave the services a pretty good run-through, comparing not only performance, but feature sets, ease-of-use and compatibility concerns. Additionally, Alexander and I were able to test both services personally to see how the two compared.

Tom’s noted that Gizmo had a better feature set, offering free voicemail, a $0.25 CallOut credit with every new account, compatibility with other Jabber clients for instant messaging and no limit to the number of callers on a conference call. Also, Gizmo had a key advantage in using the common SIP account number as opposed to Skype’s proprietary protocol. However, Skype’s significant advantage came in it’s support for 26 different languages, giving Skype much better international appeal, not to mention its already enormous userbase. Skype also has the advantage in hardware options. There are a host of different hardware options that integrate directly with Skype. Gizmo lacks specific hardware support.

When it came to performance, Skype seemed to be a little bit more reliable when bandwidth became a problem, although both seemed to offer good performance with sound on-par with that of cellular phones. Gizmo has much better call diagnostics, though, by offering a call quality indicator that showed the “strength” of the signal while on a call.

Overall, Tom’s felt that Skype was the “King,” although Gizmo is making noise and gaining some ground. There is, however, a good bit of ground to be made up for.

Alexander and I came to a similar conclusion when testing the services. Skype worked with little or no configuration, while Gizmo never quite worked properly (at times it sounded like we were speaking underwater or in an echo chamber). In fairness, Gizmo’s forums have mentioned issues with choppy sound with certain router configurations, though we didn’t want to invest our time trying to figure it out. Nonetheless, Gizmo definitely had more to offer, including built-in conversation recording, free voicemail, SIP support, 1-cent per minute calling, and conference calls with up to 10 people at no charge. However, in the end, Skype worked reliably from the get-go, making it the winner for now. We’re hoping that Gizmo can work through some of these issues in the near future, as it’s features make it a worthy competitor to the currently dominant Skype.

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