SkypeIn Reaches Beta Users

galdur writes "Skype quietly released a new 1.2 beta featuring SkypeIn (in US, UK, France, China & Hong Kong), central voicemail (for those not using the free 3rd party SAM or Pamela), and finally centralised contact list. SkypeIn is the opposite of the company's SkypeOut, allowing you now to receive normal telephone calls through Skype."

Comments

Import tools - odd choices (re changelog)

[CdBee]

Why on earth would they support collecting/importing contacts from Opera but not Mozilla/Thunderbird?

what are they aiming for?

[virtualone]

i think they are trying to puch the commercial skype platform in favor of an open standard, like enum. the great ease-of-use combined with well-thought technology (nat traversal, codec) may very well succeed, if there is no open source alternative established with the same features.

Re:Nope

[Spoing]

1. The missing piece for me would be the ability to use a standard telephone, with an ATA (eg like the SPA-2000) with their service. I have no interest in using a PC soundcard (however hi-fi it may be) as a telephone.

Do you want something like this? It's cheap, provides a standard RJ-11 phone jack, and supposedly is compatable with just about any VOIP service out there. I haven't heard any complaints about it.

The only gotcha is that it *does* use the sound jacks to do the conversion to/from RJ-11 plus a USB port for power only (no data). The result is that you can use any standard phone and do not have to use an analog headset or buy a much more expensive ethernet-to-RJ-11 converter.