There’s a VoiP program called “Gizmo.” They’re offering a deal that will likely ratchet up the VoiP war, namely free calls from a computer to a regular telephone. I just tried using it, and frankly, I’m not all that impressed.

First of all, you have to read the fine print. The free calls only apply when you and the recipient are registered with Gizmo, the recipient is in your contacts list, and is in one of 60 countries on the free-call list. I didn’t see the first two of those three points until after I made a call to a number in Japan, and after 6 minutes got a robotic and incomplete “You have… seconds!” message twice during the call. After hanging up, I noticed that a charge of 24.5 cents had been noted. Upon researching, I found out that you get 25 cents free–so I was just about to get cut off when I ended the call, it seems.

The thing is, now that I’ve used it, I don’t think I’d really want to. The reason: the quality is really bad, like a bad cell phone connection. Lots of streamed audio artifaction. Even Gizmo points out that Skype–what I’m used to using–has great sound quality in comparison. But the question would be, if I’ve got Skype, why use Gizmo?

I guess the answer would be, if I needed to call a phone number instead of a computer–like, if I wanted to call my father in the U.S. on his cell phone while he was out of the house. But where Skype is usable, it is of far better quality.

Still, Gizmo has an interesting idea–and it may be a good solution for some of my Japanese students, who will go to live in the U.S., and whose parents may not be tech-savvy enough to allow Skype to work.