By Merle Nicholson, Tampa PC Users Group
merle@merlenicholson.com

Gizmo is a software-only device that allows you to make telephone calls at low cost – or free – from your PC. You need a computer, broadband internet connection and a headset and microphone. The software is a free download from http://www.gizmoproject.com.

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Calls to and from other gizmo users are free. That’s free as in unlimited, talk all you want. You can call out from Gizmo to land or mobile phones for $0.01 per minute. That’s one cent per minute. You can purchase a local area telephone number for a renewable fee so that land or mobile-based telephones can call your PC as if the PC were just another land phone.

The last two options are fee-based and are called “Call In” and “Call Out”. There’s a new program similar to “Call In” called “Area775”

I’ve been using Gizmo since November, 2005, just five months now, and have gotten a lot of very good use from it. One of my sons and I collaborate on software design. We use Windows Remote Assistance to control from my PC in Tampa to his PC in Colorado and connect voice through Gizmo at no cost for hours at a time, a few days every week.

We both use USB-connected Plantronics DSP-400 headsets with boom microphones. This has been our only expense so far at $40 each. I’ve averaged $1/month in “call-out” fees because I use it to call my clients’ land-based phones around the country. That’s 100 minutes a month, being all short business-related calls. I sometimes call my sons’ cell phones briefly if they’re away from their offices and I don’t want to tie up our land phone.

The application is a 10MB download from the website. It’s well-designed and intuitive to use. It works very much like an Instant Messenger (IM) application, except without the advertising. You set up a contact list by either manually entering callout numbers or doing a search for Gizmo users. You can also import contacts from your Outlook or Outlook Express. You can attach an Avatar (it’s just a picture) to each if you like, and also set up expandable groups of users.

When you click on a name, a side window pops up with contact information, and you can then click on which number for that person to dial if that person has more than one. There is also a dial pad to just make manual calling. Just as in IM, you can choose to hide your identity and block users. When someone calls, you get a ring and a pop-up that tells you who is calling, and an “answer” button.

Just as in IM, you can set your availability as available, away, do not disturb, and your contacts will see that flagged against your name in their own list. The contact list and options are saved on the Gizmo server. That wasn’t obvious until I installed it also on my notebook. After logging in with my user name and password, all my contacts appeared from the server, a very pleasant surprise.

When you dial and it goes unanswered, Gizmo will take a voice message, which is emailed to that person as an attached .wav sound file. You can also record both sides of a conversation, which is saved as a .wav file. Be careful here; the file can get large in a hurry!

There are options to designate ringtones and all the various sounds it uses and a very effective way to designate the sound device. This is handy for me, because I need to switch from speakers to the headset when I use Gizmo. The whole application is nicely configurable. It’s one of the best-designed little programs I’ve seen.

For calling out – that is to a non-Gizmo phone – you draw from a prepaid account. You prepay through a credit card or PayPal. As you use your minutes, the account balance is continuously updated on the home page. If you purchase a Call In number, the cost is $12 for 3 months or $35 per year.

The Gizmo Project website is pretty complete and easy to navigate through. I was disappointed only once, when I was looking for the reason it permanently installed a service called Bonjour Service. There are references to this to be found on the website, and I’ve been able to determine that it’s owned by Apple, and it helps when networking – as on a network, but it presented no compelling reason to have it. I’ve disabled Bonjour Service in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, to no detriment that I can perceive. I’d prefer that if a program like this installs a service that it start the service and then stop it when not needed instead of running it continuously, just to help manage the “startup bloat” that plagues everyone.

My youngest son in Seattle set up Gizmo to use while he is in India. He bought a “Call In” Seattle area code number to use so he can be called from within the US. But so far it hasn’t worked out. His hotel and workplace are apparently blocking the IP Port it uses. He’ll try it other places while he’s there. We did try it all out before he left Seattle; I called him by Gizmo, and also his “Call In” number and it worked just fine. He uses a notebook computer, with just some lightweight ear plug speakers, and the notebook has a built-in microphone. I had to remind him not to swivel his head while talking to the fixed-location microphone, but otherwise it worked just fine. As an aside, there is a similar, competing VoIP service called Skype, and he has called us using it from India from his computer. The results are excellent.

The connection almost all the time is as clear as land-based telephones, and although it does drop out on us sometimes, I consider it more reliable than cell phones. In any case, when a dropout does occur, we disconnect and reestablish in just seconds. As far as communicating, there is somewhat of a lack of “full duplex” where if you both talk at the same time, something is lost. But I think it’s still superior to cell phones in that regard, although somewhat less in quality compared to land-based telephones.

All-in-all, I’ve been very pleased with this and plan to continue to use it. It does save me money, but I think most importantly it provides free voice communication to other people while I’m on my computer. I’ve never thought of using it for normal conversations, but I can see how it would be especially useful to someone who has “gone mobile” – given up their landlines for exclusive mobile phone use. u