A quick review of Gizmo

Recently, I’ve been reading about Gizmo, a VOIP application that is obviously intended to go head-to-head with Skype. I was curious about how they compared, so today I gave it a try. The first thing I noticed was that Gizmo is very well organized. All of the important information is available in the main view.

A couple minutes after installation, I received a notification that I had been credited $0.25 toward their CallOut service. Very smart. I immediately called Jenn at work to see how it sounded. It was quite clear, with minimal compression artifacts and no noticeable latency. Their pricing is a bit lower than Skype’s.

A little later, I convinced Wade to download it so we could try a computer-to-computer call. The latency was still very low. However, the compression was much more obvious this time. Skype is clearly better for computer-to-computer calls.

Conference calling is admittedly lacking in this release of Gizmo. In order to set one up, you need to have everyone call the same number in the 212 area code. Built-in conferencing is promised in a future release.

IM and file transfer also appear to be missing. These aren’t such a big deal, because most already use a service that allows for these. However, it would be nice to see these in Gizmo.

Overall, Gizmo is very impressive. With some work, I think they’re going to be giving Skype a run for their money.