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Skype wireless phone from Siemens to ship at last: reviewer approves!

Siemens has gone overboard in promoting Skype, with products to allow you to step away from your computer - using DECT phone wireless. And RTX Telecom in Denmark has also signed up to develop and market cordless phones  that could be used both for Skype. And finally, a reviewer has managed to get his hands on the kit.

Skype (for those who have yet to try it) is a free phone service using broadband. If your computer is permanently connected to the Internet, then any other Skype user can chat to you at no extra charge; instead of transferring data files, you transfer data streams, which are digitised voice sounds. It's easy, too; no expertise needed. (I'm gkewney at skype, by the way).

Here's the problem: you have to be next to your PC to use it. Worse still, you probably have a headset - something like the Sennheiser - which will give you brilliant full-HiFi audio - but tethers you to the machine. We're really too hooked on mobile and cordless phones to tolerate that!

A great way to get around this is to get a Linksys Bluetooth dongle ; and plug it into the USB port on the PC. It will work with your standard Bluetooth hands-free earpiece.

Not only does this give you wireless freedom, but it gets around another real problem: hearing the phone ring!

Skype does ring; when someone calls, it's quite loud, and sounds like a phone ringing. Excellent. The thing is, obviously enough Skype uses your sound card to speak to you and record your voice for digitising. And the sound card plays back through the speaker, and if you plug the headset in, through the headset. Try it: you'll discover that if you take the headset off, you can barely hear the tinny sound of the ring. Move into the next room? forget it.

But if you plug in the Bluetooth device, you have an extra option. In the Skype menu, skype_menu.jpg you'll see you can switch the voice sounds and microphone to the Bluetooth device, while leaving your PC speaker to deafen the household when a call comes in.

Where's the problem? It's simple enough, and for anybody who has used Bluetooth audio, it will be obvious enough: you can't move far away from the PC. Bluetooth range isn't great. Go down stairs, and the sound quality will be pretty dismal, and you may even lose the connection.

But it's worse than that! - if the phone rings, you can't answer. It's not the end of the world; you can still run like mad to the PC and press the mouse, but it's hardly civilized.

Enter Siemens and the Gigaset M34 USB. It may not look like it, but that little dongle is a full DECT base station. Unlike some of the bodges  that put your Skype calls through to your mobile (useful, perhaps, but costly!) this is a simple cordless phone link.

In other words, once you have that plugged in and working, you can take calls on your standard cordless phone.

We've been  eager to review one of these for some time, but dang! - beaten to the punch by Simon Perry, who has published his review   - well, he calls it a preview - of the dongle, working with a Siemens DECT phone.

What we still don't know, at the end of that, is where to get these toys outside Germany, and how to use the dongle with any existing DECT cordless phone you may already have bought (if it's possible at all). The problem has been a long delay, very probably because German ISDN phones work to slightly different standards from those in Britain.

It has to be worth it, nonetheless. Perry says that the integration between DECT and Skype isn't yet seamless - if you're switching from a standard phone call to Skype and back, it could be simpler, he finds. And a list of your Skype contacts on the phone? - that would be nice, he says.

No doubt, all that will be fixed in the next release.

One word of warning: if you do manage to get hold of the Gigaset M34 do not try to use it with your standard Skype setup. It requires installation of special drivers, which come on the disc included with the USB dongle.