I have been intensely testing the new Skype version 1.0 that was released just a few days ago. After the initial enthusiasm, the excitement has settled and I can report even more objectively about my personal impressions on this long-awaited release features, performance and reliability.

Skype has been a voice communication tool of its own since it first came out less than a year ago. Different from most other alternatives out there, Skype offered from the beginning a powerful and often effective solution to carry out high-quality voice conversations between distant PCs connected to the Internet.

For those having a high-bandwidth Internet connection, that is, something better than a traditional dial-up connection, Skype has been mostly paradise. The relatively easy download, setup and initial operation puts even the most technophobic users on the driver seat after only a few minutes.

The quality of the voice is absolutely outstanding, and in the quality range of a stereo hi-fi system. Nothing to even resemble the quality of standard phone call.

Delay and latency are practically non-existent. Issue is, most people use Skype with a PC and while using the built-in mike and speakers. So while there is no greater latency than about 100-200 ms (milliseconds), if the other party has her speakers turned up you may hear a little echo bouncing back to you from her mike. Just put on a good headset with mike and the problem is solved.

Much has been written about the new SkypeOut feature, which allows pre-paid PC-to-phone worldwide interoperability. I myself have extensively tested this feature in these last five days, and nonetheless I understand that the service is being refined and that there has been such an overwhelming demand to require the temporary closing of further applications for it, I have valuable information to share on this.

SkypeOut is a great feature that allows you to call almost any landline or mobile phone in the world. You simply need to pre-pay (10, 25, 50 EU) and then you can immediately start dialing telephone numbers like you would do from your traditional phone.

Connection time to the number you have dialed, may vary a great deal and may take up to one minute or more, depending on network traffic and other variables including your computer available RAM memory and system resources.

Skype utilizes a great deal of memory and system resources, at least on Windows PCs (Skype is also available for Linux and Mac computers), to the point where your computer may become next to unusable if you attempt to run other resource intensive applications together with it (e.g.: Outlook, Groove, etc.). This happens when a phone call is running and it is independent of the amount of talking being carried out. My advice is to run Skype as much as possible without too many other applications running in the background with it.

The SkypeOut service is great, though it is not 100% reliable. Some numbers, especially some mobile phone numbers I have not been able to call at all. Other mobile numbers that I have called were not able to hear my voice though I was able to hear theirs without problems. Quality of some calls was downright not acceptable at least for one of the two parties to the point that the call had to be dropped. At times, simply re-dialing the same person number would provide a much better connection quality.

Quality of the audio during a telephone call can vary and though infrequently, one voice may become distorted or downright incomprehensible.

Delay/latency are within very acceptable terms and if the recipient of your SkypeOut call is on a traditional phone you will not hear any echo. The quality of voice for people responding through a traditional telephone is not nearly as good as the native Skype quality.

A good number of times I was stricken by a sharp rifle shot sound as I was waiting for a PC-to-phone connection to complete. This, outside of being rather scary and later annoying, is a technical glitch that sometimes anticipates bad phone connections. So, for now take it as a funny alert, and live with it.

The SkypeOut calls I have done have reached as far away as Patagonia in the South of Argentina, Terceira, one of the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic, Boston, Los Angeles, London, Romania and Italy where I attempted several calls to mobile numbers.

Overall the results were impressive. At least 60% of the calls were completed successfully and the ones were I could actually carry out a full conversation were orders of magnitude better than on a traditional phone line.

Some calls were of very bad quality too. As said, I could not hear properly my partner or there was such a bad voice quality that a conversation could not be carried out effectively. As mentioned above, calling at a different time made all of the difference in the world.

Costs for the calls were absolutely extraordinary. While I plugged in 10 EU for my initial set of tests, I have now spent over 2 hours in phone calls to all parts of the world (45 mins to Argentina alone, 15 with the UK, etc.) and am still looking at a remaining 3.5 EU that I have yet to spend. I just can't believe my eyes!

On the remaining fronts, Skype has greatly improved its offering by adding a powerful file transfer facility that allows you to send directly to any other Skype (computer-based) user any file you want, up-to-2 Gigabytes in size. The feature works and reliably so.

Personalization (add your photo), social (share your contacts), privacy protection (select who can call you or even see you online), and multi-party conference calling features make the freely downloadable Skype a truly must-have tool for anyone (yes Mac friends, you will need to wait a little longer).

The only area where Skype has still lots to learn and refine is in the user interface. This is an age where effective UI designers can truly take products from the ashes to heaven or vice-versa. Luckily for Skype, the interface and its ease of use, could not be much worse than what they have already made it, and given the phenomenal adoption of Skype (over 7 million active users) it will probably be one of the key items to be addressed in the next release.

The Skype interface is not as bad as some other conferencing or communication products, but it surely does not make any effort to facilitate my ability to find what I need, to have icons that are simple and easy to read, and to better understand the actual clickflow of any phone user. I see broad margins of improvement in these area, and once I get a Skype that looks as it should and interoperates also across different operating systems, I will have no restrain is saying that this is the killer VoIP solution we were all looking for.

Bravo Skype!