VOIP Yahoo Messenger Launches Tomorrow
Michael Arrington
25 comments »
This has been coming for a long time, but starting tomorrow (March 22) you can download (if you have a Windows machine, that is) the new Yahoo IM client with full inbound and outbound VOIP capabilities. That means that, like Skype, users will be able to receive call from, and make calls to, any normal telephone (standard telephone service is often referred to as “POTS”). Screen shot is below.
Pricing is competitve to Skype:
- Phone Out: Call normal phone numbers in 180 or so countries from your PC. Pricing starts at $0.02 per minute. For more on rates, see here.
- Phone In: (for U.S., France and UK users only) - Receive calls on your PC from traditional and mobile phones for $2.99 per month or $29.90 per year.
- Free Voicemail: Free voicemail for inbound calls, and voicemail messages are linked from Yahoo Mail.
Phone Out on Yahoo is a little cheaper than Skype on average (Skype rates, in Euros, are here). Phone In is also cheaper - Skype charges 30 Euros per year for their comparable product. Skype has video calls, of course, and Yahoo doesn’t. Neither company frustratingly, allows for call recording (Gizmo has this feature and I love it).
Yahoo licenses GIPS VoiceEngine Multimedia infrastructure for the back end VOIP technology.
nice summary, the best I have found so far.
Honestly why would anyone use yahoo messenger except out of convience of not having to run more then one messenger. It’s massively bloated taking on about 40 MB of ram while skype take on about 21 mb and googletalk at about 11 (no outbound voice yet).
Ross, I’ve had huge technical issues with Skype. It routinely shots down randomly and freezes my comp. I’ve even imaged my computer and run it lean to see if it was a config issue, but alas not. Competition is a good thing here and I’ll be using Yahoo! to phone back home to South Africa.
Skype: share your bandwidth with the world!
Global IP Sound: same codec as Skype.
I’m in the Philippines, and calling here using Yahoo! is 16 cents/minute. That’s the same as the AT&T rate, and I guess other telcos are the same.
Skype is 19 cents. Janus Friis is coming here and I think he’ll work out a deal with the local telcos.
ross It’s massively bloated taking on about 40 MB of ram while skype take on about 21 mb and googletalk at about 11 (no outbound voice yet).
1996 called and their want their complaints about ram back. Who cares when the average PC ships with 512MB?
Yahoo ships with a lot of goofy avators which might be hip with the kids. I prefer gtalk’s simple interface. Actually I prefer http://campfirenow.com but that’s more for business. How much would it take for them to add VoIP for meetings? Not much.
you can record your coneversations using hot recorder 4 voip: http://www.hotrecorder.com/
Gizmo is much cheap - only 1 cent per minute - than skype or yahoo.
I just ordered the VOIP for Yahoo. Seems to work ok. They only advertise 1 usb phone you can purchase. Will all the others out there work for PC to PHONE?
Thanks..
question: how much bandwidth is used for phone conversation with yahoo
ooo süper
Still wondering if there is any freeware like Hot Recorder for recording Yahoo, Gtalk or Skype calls?
i want new yahoo messenger 2006
i love you all noe matter what they say
I kill cats.