SkypeIn Review

Updated on November 17, 2023
By Pete Freitag

I have been using SkypeIn service from Skype to receive and make phone calls over the internet for about 4 months now. I thought I would post a short review for anyone considering using the service. I also wanted to post some things that Skype can do to improve the service.

What do I like about it?

I think the most compelling reason to choose skype right now over other services is the range of devices that work directly with skype. They support bluetooth headsets, a range of USB phones (here is the phone I use), WiFi phones, and even devices that you can plug a regular phone into.

I am also a fan of the price. Since I'm bootstrapping my own business SkypeIn and SkypeOut can save you a ton of money as a business phone.

What I don't like about Skype

The Skype client leaves much to be desired. When you get a new voice mail it shows up in your events. You have to click on the phone number of the person that left the message to play the message. Everywhere else in the program clicking on the phone number dials the phone number. This inconsistency makes it confusing.

Voice Mail also seams to be stored on the client computer. If you use more than one computer you may end up with voice mail on different computers. Which can be a pain!

It would be really nice if they could either email them to you as MP3's. Or it would be nice if you could login to their site and listen to them.

The address book in skype is also really limited. There doesn't really seam to be any way of editing your SkypeOut contacts. You have to make new contacts for each phone number a person has (pete work, pete cell, pete office).

And finally it would be really nice if they formatted phone numbers so you can read them. When you get a call from 12345678901 it is kind of hard for your brain to process all those numbers. It could be formatted better based on the country code. And for bonus points why not add where the person is calling from. In the US you could gather the state from the area code, outside the US you could display the name of the country, and perhaps more info depending on the country.

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SkypeIn Review was first published on May 02, 2006.

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Comments

Pete, we are bootstrapping as well and using skype in/out for our office phone for Grid7. Agree w/ your feedback and add that it would be nice to be able to config outgoing caller id to reflect the skypein number. The overall setup is great though and their call quality has come a long way since skype 1.0.

Sean

by Sean Tierney on 05/02/2006 at 2:42:10 PM UTC

Hey Sean, Yeah I agree that showing the caller ID on SkypeOut calls would be another really good feature. Having it optional even better.

by Pete Freitag on 05/02/2006 at 2:47:38 PM UTC

I think some of your comments are addressed in Beta release on May 03.06
such as countries for example.

by Kaya on 05/03/2006 at 5:23:38 AM UTC

But how's the sound quality compare to landlines? or one of the other voip services like vonage?

by peter on 05/31/2006 at 12:17:07 AM UTC

I've also been using Skype for a few months. I agree with all your suggestions. That voice mail issue with more then one computer is a pain in the ***. I now have a Skypin number and a Skype Linksys CIT200 Linksys VOIP phone. When you install the software for the phone it will change your sound device to the Linksys CIT200 and will override you computers default sound device, as a consequence you will not be able to hear your computer speakers. After doing some manual tweaking, I have my computer sound back. However, I'm satisfied with the overall performance of Skype and the Linksys CIT200 VOIP phone. I think this minor bugs will be fixed via updates. I can't complain about the coast: $38.00 for a number with voice mail,$14.95 a year for unlimited calling to US and Canada numbers and $99.00 for a phone that has a nice interface with the Skype client.
Tim

by Tim on 01/06/2007 at 3:12:48 PM UTC

Is there any service (paid I would presume) that would allow my Skypein number to be shown as a caller ID? It may be a long time before Skype will have caller ID for the U.S.

by Charlie Morel on 08/19/2007 at 6:30:22 PM UTC