Skype!
I finally had the opportunity to use Skype tonight, thanks to an ambitious friend. He sounds much better over Skype than he does on instant messaging.
I use dial-up (56K) and he has cable (5,000 K X 384). As he observed, I’m the short end of the stick, the weak link in the connection. I wore headphones. He used a combined headset and microphone “deal” (Andrea ANC-550). We fidgeted with a few of his mics until we found one that worked okay. We had problems with his voice sounding digital quite a bit with one mic that had less background noise. We chose to use the mic with more background noise that made his voice sound less digital. Sometimes there were long delays. Once in a while, it was because I was browsing on the Web, which slowed my connection down. I could use one browser window okay without causing much interference, but I couldn’t use more than that.
He said he could hear me just fine. I was not using any special microphone–just the hole in my computer. My mouth was probably no closer than ten inches from the mic.
The connection wasn’t steady. Our calls got disconnected quite a bit. I’m not sure whether that is because of problems with my Internet connection or issues with Skype or issues on his end. My computer only crashed once and my landline phone only rang twice while I was supposedly dialed in.
When we chat, we usually use IM, so at first, I was joking that we’d use Skype’s IM capabilities more than talking.
I had to keep reminding myself not to whistle, sing, or yell profanity, behaviors I frequently do when I use my computer.
“I finally get a taste of the real j!” he exclaimed.
It’s difficult to use emoticons, of course.
Addendum 2/11: We also did a test from a higher-speed connection.
