ipod touch as VOIP phone?

[Dorkenstein]

I am reading on lifehacker about how to use an ipod touch with certain VOIP services to make it sort of like a "skype phone".

What is the opinion of the experts here? I don't have a phone at all, would this be okay if I don't need to talk too much but people can still contact me? What order should I do everything in? The lifehacker article is kind of confusing. Thank you very much.

 

[2Xtreme21]

I don't think it'd work as there is no microphone or speaker on the ipod touch, IIRC.

 

[Dorkenstein]

It will work as far as that goes, there is a touchmod microphone that you can buy for it. I just need to work out the software part of it.

 

[pm]

I've used Fring on my iPhone to make Skype-out calls while travelling in Europe. It worked very well - I'd buy a cup of coffee at an internet cafe and then make super-cheap international phone calls over their WiFi. I don't think it would work well for incoming calls - among other things, the background process that Fring uses doesn't run in any of the deeper low-power modes. So to get incoming calls you'd need to make sure that it doesn't power down... which would kill your battery life.
http://www.fring.com/

Fring is available on the 1.1.4 installer for jailbroken iPod Touch and iPhone, but it hasn't been ported to 2.0 and it's not in the AppStore. And, yeah, you'd need a microphone adapter to use it with a Touch.