truphone saves my communications challenged $%#$

Taking four weeks off work wasn’t really a possibility for me so I’ve also been putting in a solid day while doing the adoption thing here in Kazakhstan. It has meant a lot of late nights (we are ten hours ahead of the east coast of the US) but that isn’t anything new for me.

Given that calling from Kazakhstan to the rest of the world is 50 cents a minute even on the cheapest calling card I could find, I’ve been relying on VOIP calling to keep me hooked up with the office.

I’ve been almost exclusively using truphone on my iPhone to do it and the truphone VOIP network has worked perfectly. You can get the applet for free from the iTunes application store and then you just create an account on the truphone website and give them your credit card. They hit you every time you get below $10 on your account and at something like one cent to five cents a minute it takes a long time to use up that $10.

So far it has worked even on a low bandwidth connection and with the except of a slight delay on some calls I may as well have been on my mobile directly.

I’ve also been using the Skype client for the iPhone as my backup and it has worked solidly as well. So if you are travelling to a communication challenged location these two applications will save you big cash.

So now that I’ve bubbled about both of these applications I think both truphone and Skype should be showering me with free minutes…guys…you out there? I’m waiting….