Fring!

I got suckered into the whole Skype thing a while ago, and it's saved a lot of money talking to family back in Australia; So much, in fact, that I'm soon cancelling my land-line subscription with the evil Coditel because it now serves no purpose.

Many of the friends I've made in Brussels were expats, meaning most of them hang around for a year and disappear not long after. Keeping in touch over Skype has become easier than bothering with IRC or MSN.

What stopped me from using Skype originally was that I refuse to use a headset — I want a phone, a real phone and not one of these junk handsets. I eventually converted my Siemens SL1 into a dual-purpose phone after buying an M34 USB to DECT. Unfortunately Siemens made this more difficult than it really needed to be (a story in itself, if anyone's interested).

Cordless Skype is great in my apartment, and now real products with this functionality are coming on the marketing, including almost interesting Wi-Fi capable devices like the Linksys iPhone.

However, I already have a Wi-Fi capable phone, and it works as a phone beyond my apartment. It's my Nokia E70, my 2006 lust-phone! Being a phone by design, it breathes streaming audio for a living, and it can connect to the Internet though wireless LAN, GPRS, or 3G's UMTS; so why can't it run Skype?

Well, there is still no Skype for the Symbian operating system that runs on the phone, and Skype have either claimed it to be a waste of time, poor quality, or simply delayed.

Enter, stage left: Fring.

Fring acts as a broker, allowing you to run several related services such as MSN, Google Talk, and of course Skype. Fring connects to its own servers which in turn exchange information on your behalf between these services: Brilliant idea, and the quality normally isn't too bad.

Plus, the client isn't too difficult to use as an IM client, so I've now started to use this when I'm not home.

This weekend I'll be spending a lot of time at the office doing over-time for a big software upgrade, and Fring should turn out to save me from boredom!