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Sony Announces Skype For PSP, Homebrewers Respond
Croakyvoice writes "Sony has finally officially
announced that Skype is coming soon to the PSP. The VoIP service is slated to hit the company's handheld at the end of January. The application will be available via a firmware update and is
only compatible with PSP Slim & Lite Consoles. After the announcement
the PSP homebrew scene released a new application called Furikup which will allow you to make phone calls with your PSP and is compatible with the original phat PSPs."
Furikup is a beta quality SIP client for the PSP. It's always nice to see the increasing number of devices supporting SIP. Without the luxury of having a PSP to play with Furikup, but having another SIP device (Nokia E61) I can give some recommendations to new users Voice-over-IP (VoIP).
There are a number of free incoming number DID providers. A few examples:
SipNumber provides Iowa State numbers.
IPKall provides Washington State Numbers.
OrbTalk provides London geographic numbers.
Google's Recent acquisition of GrandCentral is a very tempting prospect even though it is not a true SIP provider. You can get a phone number in almost any locale with GrandCentral and forward the number to the above two US-based providers. You may almost register for a Gizmo account and forward directly to it through GrandCentral. Once the Gizmo SIP account is registered to your device it'll ring when called from a regular landline.
The problem with having this many accounts is finding a service which can aggregate your numbers in one place so you don't have dozens of SIP accounts to register in your device. Voxalot is a nice service but they charge $15/year. Another one is PBXES.org but I would stay away from them. They have a notorious reputation of locking accounts and demanding a 50 Euro ransom to regain access. My personal favorite is MySipSwitch. It's free, does SIP aggregation, and allows simple dial-plans to maximize cheap calling over SIP. It's also an open-source project and the developers directly answer questions from the community in the forums.
Coupling this with services like PhoneGnome, it's possible receive calls from all over the world with some very simple guides (link #1, link #2) out there. Go ahead and give it a try. A big congrats to the coders that are bringing SIP functionality to the PSP.
It exists. SvSIP allows to to send and receive calls with SIP on your Nintendo DS. You can download it at http://svsip.free.fr/spip.php?rubrique9. There are also a couple free places you can use with it to make free calls on your DS that you can find by looking at the accompanying gbadev forum thread at http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14121.
It's pretty cool, though, the out-going quality is sort of bad (it could just be the free service I was using), while the incoming sound to your DS sound just fine.
So, take that PSP :-P