It doesn’t quite work like that, what you need to look at is what it costs to use Skype to call the various countries you want to call (different rates for land lines and mobile phones). I’m sure there’s money to be saved, but I doubt it’ll be any cheaper to call phones in Taiwan this way. Also keep in mind that Skype tends to use a bit more battery power, as the software is polling the Skype severs all the time to make sure that no-one’s trying to call you.
[quote=“asiababy”]TheLostSwede,
Thanks. So, I need to look into what my current Skype plan offers for cellphone use. I am sure I am spending way more than I need on telecommunications, but it’s hard for this non-techhie to dig out all the programs, devices, and plans to get more for my money.[/quote]
Skype to Skype is free but Skype to phone costs money. If the other end is an international phone it is very cheap compared to calling phone to phone, but if it’s a domestic phone, it may actually end up worse than just calling them using your voice minutes.
Skype on a smartphone is treated just like Skype on a computer. That is, Skype to Skype from smartphone to smartphone is free. Thus, the key consideration here is whether the people you are speaking with the most are also on smartphones that have Skype. If so, and you both have unlimited 3G plans then you will basically circumvent incurring charges for voice minutes this way by doing Skype to Skype from phone to phone with those people as much as possible. Ideally this would work perfectly well, but in practice, most people don’t keep Skype active on their phones.
There are workable workarounds, however, which I’ll explain in a bit.
Another, more immediate effect of having a circle of friends and collegues on smartphones is that you will basically end up replacing SMS pretty much all together among that circle. Most of my friends and collegues are on iPhones or Androids, and most in Taiwan are on either GChat or WhatsApp. This means that amongst these friends, an SMS almost never happens. We use What’sApp, GChat, SkypeChat or Facebook Chat (the later three are aggregated in the IMO.im app) to do mobile instant messaging : basically replacing SMS.
This instant, free, mobile instant messaging also tends to replace voice calls for anything but things that really really require it. If most of your calling is between friends, then you’ll likely find that if all or even a few of them got onto smartphones with unlimited data plans, your voice usage would decline drastically.
The work around for international or even cross-town Skyping is to ping each other via one of these IM services to let each other know to initiate a Skype to Skype.
mabagal
Thanks, that helps a lot. The few friends I talk to a lot have smartphones with plans, so if I change up, maybe we can all save a bit of money.