So I finally moved into this century last week by downloading and installing Skype on my computer.  Notwithstanding the $15.00 I paid for my headphones, I really like what I see so far.

My primary motivation for getting Skype is my freelance work.  While I love talking to clients, it is incredibly taxing on my cellphone minutes to try to manage weekly calls with several clients.  I'm hoping that Skype will enable to reduce–or eliminate–this issue altogether, while also providing a way for me to be able to work with both hands while chatting on the line.

So here's some initial thoughts:  Skype seems to provide pretty good call quality on my cable connection.  In the few calls I've done, I've not had terrible difficulty hearing the other person, and the connection never broke up.  Plus, I like that Skype provides a built in contact manager and internal chat client for quick catch-ups with clients that do necessitate a full-blown call.

Negatives:  I've noticed that in Firefox 3, Skype recognizes phone-numbers (or at least phone-number formatted strings…) and applies some functionality to them.  At first blush, this is cool–but it does get annoying, and can seriously break an otherwise consistent design flow.  But more annoyingly is that it will apply its "help" to some numbers that are not actually phone numbers–I ran into this while developing an application yesterday.  That's just stupid.  Now I'm sure there's a way to turn it off, but why should I have to spend time figuring out how to do this?  Just don't do stupid things!

Nonetheless, on the whole I'm sold on Skype.  I'm truly hoping that it helps to streamline my processes even more, and save me some money to boot!

Oh, and BTW, be sure to add me to your Skype list if you have one:  my handle, as always, is existdissolve.