Now after using both of these apps and scrutinizing both of their functionality. I’ve gotta say skype wins the voip client battle. Both google talk and skype are excellent clients, one of kind so to speak, as there are no other apps out there that offer this quality of service where viop is concerned. The differentiation between the two is apparent in.

Interface

Skype’s blows google talks’ right out of the water. More colorful and eye catching. However google talk has a cleaner, smother, sleeker look than skype.. I guess there’s a loss and again to usage of lots of colors.. Screen shots of both clients below

Functionality

Both the clients essentially do the same thing right voip calling, conferencing, full duplex data transfer text based chat “IM”. Where voip is concerned yes. Where chatting and IM is concerned WRONG.. OH SO VERY WRONG. The chatting module of skype is far more thought out than that of google talks. There are no smiles in google talk, their sad attempt at smilies resulted in a blue highlight of the symbols for a smile. Resulting in or ;). Skype on the other hand delivers the real thing, glossy looking smilies which we all have become dependent on when expressing our emotions.. [ bless those emoticons with all your heart ].

Multi-platformed

By this I mean, the core client applications porting to the various operating systems. In the case of skype it was designed for all the major operating systems, Linux which I currently use, windows, Mac and last but not least pocket PC. Google talk on the other hand rather than making their base client application accessible to all the operating system. They made the client on a familiar protocol.. one we know as Jabber this enabled google to simply keep the google talk application native to windows and allow other operating system users to access the service via multiprotocolled IM clients, E.G. Gaim, Ichat, Trillian Pro etc. There wouldn’t be too much of a problem with googles decision in the event that all the features avaible in the google talk client [ native to windows ] would still be avaliable to the other operating system users “Namely Me”. The case however is the voip module of the application is not accessible to non windows users. so its more like google chat than google talk to us Linux or Mac users.

I declare skype the winner of the voip telephony wars and would whole heartedly recomend it over google talk.

You can/could download skype or google talk and test em both for yourselves but i’ld save the time and probably get skype instead

Download Google talk
Downlaod Skype

P.S ebay wishes to buy skype. I hope this doesn’t change the fundamental ideology behind skype..

see link for more details on skype’s possible acquisition by ebay

ebay to purchase skype

Comments are welcome.