Cheap, Free And High Quality Video And Phone Calls Worldwide

Skype is very well know for internet telephone calls and particularly for its free Skype to Skype calls, no matter where you are in the world. The system was fairly basic at first and it was either reliable, nor easy to use but the latest version 4.0 changes all that.

Recently, the Skype video call facilities have been improved and new software is available to facilitate this. What’s more, it’s free to download and free to use between Skype users.

There are many different VoIP services but Skype is probably the most popular of them all.  Much of its power is its software and interface which is dedicated to supporting video calls and has been concentrated on this for some time. Skype estimates that more than 30% of calls are video. The latest version of the software emphasises this function far more heavily than previous ones have.

If you haven’t yet upgraded to Skype 4.0 you might be in for a surprise when you do. First of all when it first starts up everything is in full screen mode and previous users will not be used to this. It used to take up just a corner of your monitor screen. This can be downsized a bit but it’s still big compared with the compact previous interfaces used by the software. The best plan here is to minimize it and leave it down in the tray until you want to use it. Obviously  the larger interface is designed to make the video functions better to use.

You can resize to full screen if you want to and there is also a smaller picture of yourself (the user) in the corner of the screen (picture in picture). File sharing and multi instant message chats can be run alongside your video call. This is a handy facility for anyone who is used to running multi chats and calls at the same time.

There are a few improvements in this version of Skype and you can now change microphones during a conversation if you want to, because the hardware detection has been improved. In previous versions you couldn’t always do this and sometimes, if you had a microphone problem you had to come right out of the program and back in to get Skype to detect the hardware and allow you to set it up correctly.

Some previous features that are quite widely used are missing from this version of Skype and these include contact groups, fast dial and the facility to keep a full history.

An update in the form of Skype 4.1 has been released and this includes a separate contact list window, but it is also planned to reintroduce some of the other older facilities at a later date.