SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

Let's start by looking at the skype.com home page. First thing to notice is that even if you enter "skype.com" in your browser's address bar, you're going to finish up on a page with a different URL, determined by either:

(a) Whether you've already been to the site leading, presumably, to a cookie being retrieved which causes a "Welcome back" landing page to be displayed; and/or

(b) The spoken language that you've selected -- or has been inferred from your IP address, or however -- which might give you a page with a different layout and culture-sensitive page content (such as "mobile phone" rather than "cell phone").

These different "landing pages" are all more or less the same, so my general argument should hold for all of them. Note that I have neither the time nor inclination to analyze the underlying code to see exactly how it all fits together, here I'm interested only in the overall effect as I'm pretty sure you are too.

Here are three sample landing pages, for international English, US English and traditional Chinese.

Click on a thumbnail image to view the full-sized page content (opening in another browser window) for each illustration in this article:

Note that I've recorded the current version of the relevant Skype web pages as fixed images, because the site's design and pages change from time to time and for the purposes of this iTWire article I needed to have a fixed point of reference.

Now how do you find out about the available pricing plans for your country?

Well, that's easy enough. Making sure that the "Use Skype" tab is selected, simply click on the link labelled "Prices" that you'll find in the top row, and currently also in the bottom row (circled in red in the illustrations).

PLEASE READ ON ...