I live in Sweden, my parents in The Netherlands. That means many international phone calls. I decided it was serious time to cut some costs and went to purchase some SkypeOut budget. Besides that I purchased a SkypeIn subscription to provide my friends in Stockholm with a cheap local number to call (until now they had to call me on my mobile number).

All done, all well. However, I didn't like the fact that I had to have my computer up and running to be able to make a Skype phone call. Besides that I don't want Skype to be up and running all the time. I already have more than enough other chat clients up and running, adding Skype to that list sounded overkill to me. So I was on the lookout for a wireless phone that supported Skype.

I ended up purchasing the Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype. It's a nice looking, black, small phone with a quite okay color screen. It's the size of a small to average mobile phone. The menu structure is easy to understand, and it seemed to work quite okay. The phone has a build in Skype client and can operate completely on its own as long as it has access to a wireless router. Cool! I made a few calls. Everything sounded okay on my end.

That was however not the case on the other end. Every single person I called complained about echo. They all could hear themselves talking to me. I tried a few firmware updates, but to no avail. The echo stayed there. Annoyingly enough, I never heard that echo, it's only at the other end. Either calling me, or me calling them, that really didn't make a difference. It made me not happy.

The battery life of the phone was so-so, and it disconnected quite often from my wireless router (I tried it with my both wireless routers from different brands). So while the idea is quite nice, the execution failed in my opinion.

So I returned the phone and ended up buying a Dualphone 3088. It's a 'normal' phone, with added support for Skype. It's a bit taller than the Belkin phone.

The Skype software is located in its base station and the base station has an RJ plug to connect it my (wired) router. All communication between the handset and the base station occurs using DECT. Again a color screen, and a virtually identical menu structure as seen on the Belkin phone. The battery life... well it simply rocks. As it should. It's just a normal DECT handset, using two AAA rechargeable batteries. Feature wise it's obviously a bit more complete compared to the Belkin, as you can also use this phone to make 'regular' land line phone calls. You can set it up to use a preferred provider (e.g. Skype or land line) or it can ask for every phone call you make. Like the Belkin phone it lists all your contacts from Skype, and it updates this list automatically the moment you add a new contact on the Skype client on your computer for instance (you can also add contacts by using the phone). Like the Belkin phone it supports over the air firmware updates and out of the box I had to update it to get it to the latest firmware release. That process went very smoothly through.

And oh, did I mention that there is no echo?