Well I logged in today to my gmail account while on my Xubuntu partition and saw something new (to me).
It seems that Google has released and internet based phone that we all can use locally for free.
There is a page that describes the rates. but there was also a pop up ( I did not screenshot) that says calls within the country I am in are free, but calls outside of the country have extremely low rates.
Here is a list of the rates for the google phone and the page the rates are listed on.
Now you can make phone calls from Gmail at extremely low rates — so you can share your two cents with France
(or Argentina, or Iceland, or Guam…) for $0.02. Check out some sample per-minute rates below or see the complete list.
| Leading internet telephony provider | ||
| United States | free | 2.1 ¢/min + connection fee |
| Canada | free | 2.1 ¢/min + connection fee |
| India | 6 ¢/min | 9.2 ¢/min + connection fee |
| UK landline | 2 ¢/min | 2.1 ¢/min + connection fee |
| UK mobile | 18 ¢/min | 25.3 ¢/min + connection fee |
| Mexico landline | 10 ¢/min | 9.9 ¢/min + connection fee |
| Mexico mobile | 19 ¢/min | 33.6 ¢/min + connection fee |
| France landline | 2 ¢/min | 2.1 ¢/min + connection fee |
| France mobile | 15 ¢/min | 20.3 ¢/min + connection fee |
Wooo hoo… It’s like the G1.1 for all of us lol… I wonder if they will slip in some ads in there.
Google Phone picture
The reason I mentioned Xubuntu is that I had just installed the latest version and then tested the Ethernet driver adapter support by heading straight to gmail and I got the notice. Since I was on Linux, and all of the android phones are owned by Google, and well since Android is based on Linux , My assumption was that Google gave all of the Linux users a cool little secret treat.
But then I booted to my winseven partition and :-(
There it is, the google phone for gmail.
I remember when msn and yahoo did this years ago. As soon as they stopped, Skype took it over.
**updated**
My question is, if you have the official Gmail ap on your droid. Does this mean you can now make calls and bypass your phone billing service since you are paying for unlimited internet ?