Friday, September 08, 2006

Busta move

The folks who brought you On Instant have released a new tiny cool-looking widget called Busta, which Dean at VoIPUser has tried out (screen shot also there). My IT Gestapo obviously won't sanction this, but I intend to try it out at home. I'm not completely thrilled at the prospect of yet another VoIP client, but for as long as GTalk doesn't do PSTN breakout, it would probably be nice to have the option to hand right on my Google page.

UPDATE: Of course, first I tried to download the full version from the site at work and got blocked, but then later I downloaded the ActiveX plug-in and set it up. If only I had a headset! One very clever thing here from the ease of adoption point of view is that, since the user registers with an email address, they can be called using that address alone. No separate user ID or handle. Call set-up to the PSTN also seems to be damned fast. Undeterred even without a headset, I had just clicked to make a test call to my desk phone, when said desk phone rang, so I cancelled my Busta call, thinking someone else was calling me coincidentally at the same time - then I realized that the call to my desk phone was from Busta. Given the call set up times for PSTN breakout in Skype or Gizmo (which aren't particularly bad, but noticeable) I hadn't expected that Busta would connect immediately, but it did.

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