Gizmo5, formerly known as Gizmo Project, is both a service and a software client. The software is available for many platforms, including Mac OS X, of course.
Basically it allows voice and video calls and instant messaging between Gizmo5 users. The calls are free as long as you’re calling another Gizmo5 user, and you can purchase credit to use for outgoing calls to regular landline phones. Now, you probably are already using another instant messaging client, so we won’t dwell on that functionality, except to say that Gizmo5 will work with most of the major IM services.
As for VoIP, most people are familiar with Skype. The problem with Skype is that everything about it is closed - it uses its own protocols, and doesn’t play well with other VoIP services and devices. Gizmo5 uses SIP protocol, and this opens up some interesting possibilities. For example, you could use the Gizmo5 client to access another SIP-based service, or you could use a hardware VoIP adapter or even an Asterisk server trunk to access your Gizmo5 service. If you don’t understand anything of what I just said, let me mention something that everyone will understand - with Gizmo5, you can potentially get more free calls, if you know how. Not only that, but your friends around the world may be able to call you from their landlines or cell phones, using a number that is a local (or nearly local) call, if they’re willing to dial a few extra digits.
Really, the problem with Gizmo5 seems to be that it was designed by true geeks, and they gave it all sorts of interesting capabilities, but they don’t do a great job on their site of telling you all about the various capabilities in a nice summary - the information is there, but the site has so many pages that finding anything specific might take a while. So, we’ll just point out a few things. We’ll warn you now that if you have no interest in getting free calls, and you’re not particularly interested in VoIP or geek-type stuff, you might not care to read any further - go ahead and skip to the next article. Still with us? Okay, here’s how to get to the free stuff!
First, there is what Gizmo5 calls Backdoor Dialing. As their site explains:
Approximately 11% of US telephones, including mobile numbers and land lines from carriers such as Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc., are connected via VoIP. Working with telecom partners we are now making it possible to dial these numbers without going through the traditional phone system.
This means you can call certain mobile and land line numbers from any computer connected to the net and talk for free. Because these calls are bypassing the traditional phone network entirely there is no per minute fee or other charge for the caller regardless of where they call from.
Now, interestingly enough, this “Backdoor Dialing” can even be used if you have set up a trunk on an Asterisk/FreePBX box but the one thing they don’t tell you is that the moment the called party answers, both parties hear a short recording that says, “This is a free call from anywhere in the world using Gizmo5″ (or something pretty close to that). They probably do this to keep businesses from (ab)using the service, but the recording is still a bit annoying. Still, it’s possible to use Backdoor Dialing without purchasing any outgoing call credit, so if you have friends with cell phones with U.S. numbers, you just might be able to call them for free. We were surprised to discover that we could make calls even to customers of MetroPCS in the Detroit area using the 0101 free calling prefix, even though that carrier is not mentioned.
When you call someone using “Backdoor Dialing”, they receive a Caller ID number that is not the same as your Gizmo5 number, but which from then on (or, at least, for some period of time) can be used to call you back - but only if they call from the same number that you called them on! So, for example, if you call their cell phone and they get a Caller ID number, they can call you back on that number from that cell phone, but not from a landline phone or from anyone else’s cell phone.
But wait, there’s even more potential opportunities for free calling - it seems that you can make calls to customers of many VoIP providers worldwide if their provider has a Sipbroker SIP-Code and accepts incoming connections. Sometimes it takes a little experimentation (and the use of Google) to figure out how it works. For example, let’s suppose you have a friend that gets VoIP service from Viatalk (a U.S. based VoIP provider). By looking down the SIP-Code list (or, preferably, using your browser’s search function on that page) you find that Viatalk has been assigned a SIP-Code of *507. So, in theory, you could dial *507 plus your friend’s Viatalk number from your Gizmo5 client, and talk to him for free. The problem is, you don’t know the format that they want to receive the number in - do they want *507 plus ten digits (area code plus number), or *507 plus eleven digits (country code + area code + number)? With some providers, one of those formats might work, but as it happens Viatalk wants to see *507+ plus 11 digits (yes, you actually put a plus sign after the SIP-Code and before the 11 digit number). If you use that format, maybe it will work and you can talk to your friend, assuming everything else is working as it should.
If that doesn’t interest you, maybe this will: You can call U.S. (and possibly Canadian) toll-free numbers free by prefacing the number with a star, e.g. *18005558355 to call TellMe.
Gizmo5 will sell you a dedicated number for incoming calls from regular telephone users for a monthly fee. What they don’t mention is that even if you don’t pay for an incoming number, your friends can still call you using any of the Sipbroker local PSTN access numbers in various locations around the globe. They would call the nearest local access number, then when prompted, dial *747 (the SIP-Code for Gizmo5), then your Gizmo5 number starting with the 1-747 (so the first digits will be *747-1-747 followed by seven more digits). It’s a lot of dialing but if you have a friend who lives overseas, or who would just prefer not to pay some wireline phone company an outrageous per-minute charge, that is a way they can call you for free.
It’s the capacity for free calls that makes Gizmo5 so interesting to us here in the CrabApple Forest. Sure, Skype would let us talk for free to other Skype users, but Gizmo5 will let us complete and receive certain other types of calls for free, if we are willing to spend a little time exploring their site and learning all the opportunities for free calls. And moreover, should we decide we’d prefer to talk using a real phone, we can always set up a hardware VoIP adapter using the standard SIP protocol, or an Asterisk SIP trunk, and use the service. No way will Skype let you do that!
We will grant that Gizmo5 isn’t the only way to make free phone calls these days. There’s just something about the geekiness of their offering that interests us, even if it does only let us make free calls to a small percentage of U.S. numbers. But even if you couldn’t care less about that sort of thing, you might find Gizmo5 handy to have installed on your laptop, so you can talk to the folks back home (those who are also using Gizmo5, or a VoIP service that’s accessible using a SIP-Code, or if they’re in the U.S. maybe you can call their cell phones using Backdoor Dialing).
By the way, if you’re the sort that would like to find any and every opportunity to make free and/or low cost calls using VoIP, you might find a blog called VOIPGUIDES interesting (be sure to check out their RSS feed). We’re not affiliated with them in any way, but they seem to be interested in finding new ways of making free/cheap calls. and frankly, we think the old wireline phone companies have been nickle-and-dimeing us to death for far too long!
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