Thursday, July 15, 2004
Stanaphone: Your Pocket PC Gets a Landline Number, and Can Call Them, Too
Posted by Pat Logsdon in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 PM
"Stanaphone launched with an interesting proposition: give free US phone numbers to its users, and allow for cheap (sometimes free) phone calls using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) technology. At the launch, Stanaphone also offered something unheard of before: 100 monthly minutes worth of calls to normal telephone numbers (in selected countries) for all users. Since then they also added a prepaid card feature, called StanaCard.
So, how does it work? Users register with Stanaphone on their site, and are assigned a telephone number, within one of available US area codes. As long as the user is running Stanaphone on a computer this number is active. Calls to this number, independently of being national or international, will be redirected to the SIP client on the user's computer. Using this SIP client users can place calls to any country in the world, and calls to a list of countries will use the 100 free minutes available monthly, before being charged. StanaCard can be used after the included minutes are all used up or if calling a country not in the list of free calls."
To use this service, you'll need a SIP client for the Pocket PC, a Stanaphone account, and a WiFi connection. The killer feature here seems to be the ability to call to and from POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) phone numbers. As far as I know, the only current competitor to this is Skype's upcoming SkypeOut service. If you've tried this, let us know what you think!
So, how does it work? Users register with Stanaphone on their site, and are assigned a telephone number, within one of available US area codes. As long as the user is running Stanaphone on a computer this number is active. Calls to this number, independently of being national or international, will be redirected to the SIP client on the user's computer. Using this SIP client users can place calls to any country in the world, and calls to a list of countries will use the 100 free minutes available monthly, before being charged. StanaCard can be used after the included minutes are all used up or if calling a country not in the list of free calls."
To use this service, you'll need a SIP client for the Pocket PC, a Stanaphone account, and a WiFi connection. The killer feature here seems to be the ability to call to and from POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) phone numbers. As far as I know, the only current competitor to this is Skype's upcoming SkypeOut service. If you've tried this, let us know what you think!
