Have been trying out the Vonage softphone with some success.
My Laptop (IBM T40), like most, has built in speakers and microphone, and I don’t want to have to bother with a headset.
The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of controlling the echo that the person I am calling hears when the mic. picks up the sound of their own voice from the laptop speakers feeding back into it.
I can’t find any third party, echo cancelling, software to turn the laptop into a decent hands free phone.
Another question that springs to mind is why the softphone software is better than the reliability and ease of use of voice conversations via an IM client – why are these so unreliable?
In general it seems that IM clients switch to peer-to-peer when dealing with file transfers or voice and this is often screwy, but there seems to be no reason why it should be.