Back when I started researching the first iPad, I learned about the UL plans and VoIP and ended up getting two iPads with UL data with the hopes of one day killing my prepaid phone, and my wife's.
I ended up using iCall on mine, but the service was so unreliable I did not sign my wife up for it. It was good enough for my usage, as I hate talking on the phone anyways. It added $10/mo to my bill. I always gave out my google voice number and linked it to icall in case ever changed to something better.
Today I finally found out about Talkatone. The free portion was no better on 3G (both icall and talkatone uncompressed want the extra bandwidth to work reliably), but went ahead and tried the 14 day premium that has the compression routines for 3G and the difference is night and day. The huge advantage is the person on the other end does not hear that echo that is prevalent with icall usage without the headphones (iPad 2 still has that issue).
One other benefit is TAT will pop up immediately instead of loading like IC, though TAT has the nuiance of requiring you to have one running app in the task manager background (less people giving up calling you). It also uses your existing GV number.
Monthly cost is $2/mo, $20/yr, so TAT wins over IC there too. Going to keep my trial going, but so far it looks like I will be closing out my IC account.
Both services I believe do not work with Bluetooth, left my BT at home today or I would verify it.
What do you use on the iPad (2), for your VoIP?
I ended up using iCall on mine, but the service was so unreliable I did not sign my wife up for it. It was good enough for my usage, as I hate talking on the phone anyways. It added $10/mo to my bill. I always gave out my google voice number and linked it to icall in case ever changed to something better.
Today I finally found out about Talkatone. The free portion was no better on 3G (both icall and talkatone uncompressed want the extra bandwidth to work reliably), but went ahead and tried the 14 day premium that has the compression routines for 3G and the difference is night and day. The huge advantage is the person on the other end does not hear that echo that is prevalent with icall usage without the headphones (iPad 2 still has that issue).
One other benefit is TAT will pop up immediately instead of loading like IC, though TAT has the nuiance of requiring you to have one running app in the task manager background (less people giving up calling you). It also uses your existing GV number.
Monthly cost is $2/mo, $20/yr, so TAT wins over IC there too. Going to keep my trial going, but so far it looks like I will be closing out my IC account.
Both services I believe do not work with Bluetooth, left my BT at home today or I would verify it.
What do you use on the iPad (2), for your VoIP?
