SoonR: Use Skype on Your Cell Phone

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1. Frank Gruber
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 8:20 pm

   Wow, this sounds very interesting! What cellphone service providers is it aligned with?

2. CoolNugget
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 8:52 pm

   Awesome. Bout time.

3. Matt
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 8:56 pm

   Am I missing something?

   Why would anyone want to use Skype on their cellphone? International calls?

   Doesn’t Outlook access already exist through POP3 connectors or over HTTP with Exchange?

4. Saul Weiner
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 9:47 pm

   Actually, this feels ahead of it’s time.

   Why?
   - broadband mobile access in the US is in it’s infancy
   - Phones screen sizes are not condusive to easy viewing and working

   The skype integration is neat, especially for folks like me who make loads of international calls, but generally, this feels like it would work more simply outside of the US than in the US… at the moment.

5. Ashish
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 9:55 pm

   Matt, I was thinking the same thing, probably for international calls. Although, if you have an unlimited data plan, I suppose you could make calls without using minutes…

6. BK
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 10:19 pm

   This is AWESOME although it will be hard to hit mainstream. As a commentator said above, this technology is ahead of its time. But I personally love it and will try it out.

7. TheWeb20Dev
   

   May 3rd, 2006 at 11:28 pm

   how many more of these omit the “e” in “er” companies can the world handle? i should go register registr.com!

8. Caili
   

   May 4th, 2006 at 12:58 am

   Awesome! The ability working with PC powered down sounds really promising.

9. Paul Fabretti
   

   May 4th, 2006 at 1:38 am

   Surely we are coming to the end of the mobile phone as we know it?

   With free telephony (or vastly reduced rates at least), the only thing mobile providers are any good for these days are subsidised handsets - which presents a dichotomy of its own. Nokia, SE etc. would no doubt be very keen to find ways of including Skype in their handsets (rather than them necessarily being carrier or user addeed software)so that they too could enter the carrier market. The problem would come in that they would be taking market share away from their own biggest customers - the carriers.

   So, it looks like we are going to be left to our own devices to find ways of using our mobiles for free calls - but SoonR is a step in the right direction.

10. Gijs Reulen
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 1:55 am

    Remote access to my files is very interesting. With my ’smartphone’ (WM5, 320×240) this is acceptable.

    And I do not have an Exchange server available for my Outlook. However, I always sync my phone with Outlook.

    The Skype thing I am not sure.

    In Europe is flat fee mobile data access acceptable in costs. In the Netherlands from € 10,- (GPRS) to € 25,- (EDGE) up to € 60,- (UMTS) per month.

11. Simran
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 2:30 am

    I like the concept, but something like this should be free. A few of my friends use Windows Mobile phones and they just install Skype on their phones and make free calls! You use your Skype out credit how it’s supposed to be used, you call other people’s phones. Calling back your own phone doesn’t make sense. Also, if other people are signed into Skype from their phones, you can just make Skype-to-Skype free calls without even having to use Skype-out credit! And all of this is from your mobile. With the coming of EDGE and GPRS, I don’t see how greedy telcos are going to survive this wave. Digg here.

12. Cem Dalgic
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 2:33 am

    SoonrSkype does not make so much sense, as you will have much more costs, so the connection to your PC via e.g. WAP and Skype Out minutes.
    FON and other WiFi-Share concepts are the beginning of a new era.

13. C
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 2:46 am

    lots of stuff to talk about when it happens soonest

14. Andrew
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 3:33 am

    Hmm, the product from http://www.eqo.com seems a little more robust when it comes to accessing Skype from your mobile..

15. Blaze
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 4:12 am

    My friend already has skype on his iMate phone, how does this need to be re-issues in the form of a business?

16. arvind
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 4:45 am

    check out the VoSKY Call Center - this device does it without Skype Out and also has call forwarding. http://www.vosky.com/product.p.....p;lang=usa

17. John Philip Green
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 5:11 am

    How is this different from http://eqo.com? I like EQO’s site better, but I haven’t tried either service.

    I’m getting really tired of company names that drop the ‘e’–it was cute when flickr did it, still cool when Motorolla did it with the Razr, but now its a turn-off.

18. Alastair James
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 6:05 am

    Great! Now when your phone gets lost or stolen people can now play havoc with your computer too!

19. fede req
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 6:52 am

    i have an idea maybe somebody has made it and i dont know.

    a program to use my skype client in my computer (with bloutooth port) and use it from my cellphone with bluetooth.

    it will be really cool if someone develop it, isn it?

20. Robert
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    This is a step towards WiFi phones, which I believe will be the future. M

    any, many years ago… It could have been thought that the only broadcast method for television was through airwaves. That progressed to cable, and then satellite — which goes to show how technology changes.

    I highly doubt that +10 years from now we won’t see a WiFi rollout for a new generation of “cell” phones (hey, maybe a wi-phone?!).

    1) WiFi is WAY cheaper
    2) WiFi can have a much longer range
    3) It would offer broadband access

    What else could you ask for?

21. Alastair James
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    Robert:

    I agree that Wi-fi phones may be around the corner, however, if all those plus points you list were real, it would exist by now!

    Point 2: WiFi cannot have anywhere near the range of a cellular style network. I know people manage to squeeze long distances out of Wifi, but thats (fixed) point to (fixed) point. Serving multiple roaming clients in the same cell is much harder. Most WiFi base-stations only support upto 100feet!

    Which kind of leads on to point 1. Yes individual WiFi hardware is cheaper, but this because WiFi hardware is not of the same scale. I think it would cost alot more to cover a phone network using many

22. Alastair James
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 12:28 pm

    Oh! I appear to have been truncated (ouch!)… You get the idea….

23. Search Engines WEB
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 1:16 pm

    Just downloaded and tested it - works well, … will be very convenient for emergencies.

    Thanx for the Heads-Up

24. Kalle
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

    Really useful tool, I tried it out and love the easy interface and caching functionality. And the Skype/wifi connection is really interesting, that wifi-phone market is about to explode, and with all the free wifi available everywhere, this is a killer service.

25. Robert
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    Alastair:

    You are correct… I thought about it, and WiMax would probably be the best bet, having a range of up to 31 miles.

    I don’t know very much about that technology in particular, and it was just a thought. I also believe that Bill Gates said something to the affect that cell phones are doomed, and WiFi (or WiMax) phones are the future.

    If a company could rollout a decent chunk of WiMax coverage and then have a proprietary WiPhone built, they would almost instantly gain as much traction as standard cell carriers… Think about it: You could essentially dominate the cell phone market, broadband market, VoIP market, and possibly the TVoIP market… Whoever does this will make a fortune.

26. Song Huang
    

    May 4th, 2006 at 6:37 pm

    Hello, I am one of the founders of SoonR. It’s great to see all the activity here and the questions.

    Someone asked why they would want to have SoonR when they have the Skype client on a Windows mobile phone with wifi. That phone you have is a great phone but in the scheme of things, harddly any have been sold. All the Blackberries and Windows Mobile phone combined make up about 2% of the market. They are literally hundreds of millions of phones out there that SoonR will work on. It uses SkypeOut to the mobile phone which is a regular voice call, not a data call. You are not gated by the speed of your connection. This is very important. Also, SoonR works with phones that you get for FREE when you sign up for a contract.

    As for cost, let me give you an idea. I have Verizon wireless. SoonR has engineers in Scandinavia. If I call Scandinavia wiht my cell phone, the cost is $1.49 a minute. Now, if I sign up for an international plan and pay $3.99 a month, then the cost drops to $0.23 a minute. Still not super cheap. using SoonR Talk, I pay for a local SkypeOut call from my computer to my phone. It’s $0.02 a minute. There’s a huge difference when you talk for thousands of minutes a month. In fact with SoonR Talk, I can conference multiple parties in different parts of the World and still only pat $0.02. It’s an incredible value.

    I hope I was able to answer some of the questions. Thanks for all the feedback! And it was great meeting Michael at the OnHollywood show.

27. Simon
    

    May 5th, 2006 at 8:28 am

    Has anyone taken a look at what Seven has? http://www.seven.com

    I used it with my phone via Cingular’s Xpress Mail service. Very similar stuff minus the other integrations that SoonR offers…

28. andy
    

    May 7th, 2006 at 12:18 pm

    I seem to be missing what advantage this has over any ordinary callback service.

    For example, it doesn’t seem to involve gprs or 3g to actually route the calls via data rather than voice tariffs, which could be very useful while roaming in different countries

    The founder mentions above using it to make international calls from a mobile. From the call charge of 2c this appears to be a US mobile. You can use a calling card or callthrough or callback service for very similar tariff. In fact there are ways to reach a SIP address for no extra cost over a pstn gateway number.

    Other countries’ mobile networks have higher termination charges, and Skype’s tariffs to them are not necessarily competitive. If I was on a foreign holiday for 3 weeks, I’d be more likely to use ordinary pstn or VoIP callback that didn’t need leaving the PC unattended for that time.

    If I’ve missed some of the facilities and intentions of the product please let me know.

29. kosmar
    

    May 8th, 2006 at 8:55 am

    i want skype on the phone.
    not another thing that plugs in both machine and device like eqo or soonr.

    while the pc is on i could use talkety or jajah right away anyway.

    i guess the skype api has no clues for this, hence the workarounds. too bad, but it seems to cool to skype on the mobile, that even these seems to be accepted.

30. Valor
    

    May 8th, 2006 at 11:41 am

    A couple people mentioned EQO (www.eqo.com), but no one mentioned that it supports Macs. I use it with my Treo 650, and it works great!

31. pemga
    

    May 12th, 2006 at 1:13 am

    kosmar, yepp, but you have to pay a great sum for gprs roaming This is much cheaper.

32. Tom
    

    June 9th, 2006 at 12:50 am

    Hello all,
    after about a month of using SoonR on my Nokia 6680 (Symbian phone with Opera browser), I must say that I am impressed. The latest version has been very stable and does what it is supposed to do. I wrote my impressions on my blog (thanks for the heads up, Michael).

    The observation about losing your phone and/or having it stolen is a good one. I guess you should just immediately login to SoonR and change your password, alternatively maybe they could setup an incoming SMS number where you could send a long code (20 hex characters or something) to temporarily block access to your account (until logging in and jumping through a bunch of security question hoops). Song, if you are listening, please let me know if you make this feature available (I would save the message in my wife’s phone for easy access).

    Cheers,
    Tom

33. Song Huang
    

    June 9th, 2006 at 3:17 pm

    Tom, we are thinking about security all the time at SoonR. If you lose your phone, you can pick up ANY other data enabled phone and use it to shut off SoonR access. You just log in as yourself and tell it to “forget” the login credentials for mobile login. But also note that this is only a problem if you have selected to “remember” your credentials for quick login. Each time you access SoonR, it will ask for credentials unless you have explicitly told it not to.

    In addition, you can use ANY web browser on a PC and shut off access. use http://www.soonr.com/mobile for a simulation of the phone interface . Also remember that no information is stored on the phone, so a lost phone doesn’t mean that your contact list or documents could get into the wrong hands. This is a very critical security issue.

    Finally, when you log into SoonR on a PC browser, notice that there is an tab that allows you see which devices have been used to log into your SoonR account. Very soon you will be able to shut down specific devices. Again, in the interest of security.

    Your idea about SMS codes is a good one. We have been exploring the use of shortcodes for many things. Something as simple as SMS is deceptively difficult to implement around the world. There are several situations where SMS messages cannot cross carriers, especially in different countries. So we will devise alternatives. The feature exactly as you describe it is not available, but similar functionality will appear.

    I’m glad you like SoonR. I think you can see the power that it brings to “normal” handsets. Just think if the world does turn into a Wimax based system, SoonR only becomes more powerful. It’s like when modems were 300 baud compared to our 1.5mps DSL speeds to the home today. What can be done is simply astounding. We are excited about the wireless future.

    P.S. I am affiliated with SoonR.

34. larry
    

    July 6th, 2006 at 6:16 am

    Another interesting project in case you already pay
    for unlimited data service - try one of the goMyPlace
    servers. Open source based (all code is GPLed),
    completely free service allowing access to the file
    system/command shell on the remote PC/Mac/Linux

    requires only WEB browser on the cellphone.

    best part - smart data caching on the proxy server (host uploads a file only once) and
    the proxy server itself. check it out.

35. Arman
    

    August 4th, 2006 at 8:41 pm

    I have a Sony Ericcson T237 and among the mentioned applications and services pertaining to this matter (EQO, SoonR, VoSKY), I don’t know what to choose. Basically my goal is to use a cell phone with the cheapest service possible. I will only be calling within Canada, so I already understand that calls will be free to landlines and mobiles (within Canada and America) with the usage of Skype. I have looked up in EQO and they do not support my version of the phone. SoonR and VoSKY are the options left. And seeing that SoonR is free, the only thing I will have to purchase is the WAP service. But if I use a Sim Card-Free phone, than I can call 1-800 numbers for free. Than I can just purhcase the VoSKY and no reccuring payments is needed. Please point me in the right direction and correct me if I am wrong. Thank You!

36. sihernandez
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 6:50 pm

    jan 5 2007 7:30pm i’m a very new user of new tech, i have an HTC TyTN can anyone tell me the xact steps to get on the net with it. i have Skype on my Hp pavilion dv8130us (fixed Incom Sen Cit)

37. melanie
    

    January 23rd, 2007 at 7:48 pm

    hello….i want to use skype calll from pc to cellphone how can i do this?Is there any thing i should do over the phone,or it’s what a pc do only?thanks…GOD BLESS