Suddenly Skype seems so much less necessary.

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

I’ve set it up, I’ve tried it, and I love it. Works beautifully.

I already use Google voice for all of my international calls--the rates are pretty reasonable--but the fact that it ties into my Google Voice account is a nice bonus. The only significant negative with Google Voice--and it is a significant negative--is that I have missed a few incoming calls. Apparently there are a few carriers who refuse to acknowledge the existence of Google Voice. Since I use this for business, again I say: this is a significant negative.

Sadly, it doesn’t even block the salesman who has called me about fifteen times since last Thursday. I gave him an hour of my life on Friday, listened to his pitch, and told him that I didn’t have the budget or the inclination to buy right now; I even told him he should call back toward the end of September when I was looking over the marketing plan and the budget for next year.

Funny enough, I really was going to consider a trial run with his product, but the constant calling after I told him to leave me alone until I had a chance to look at next year’s budget has solved that particular problem. There is no way that I am buying from him.

Let this be a lesson to any of you in sales: don’t harass the prospect and don’t talk yourself out of a sale.

I do wonder what they’ll be charging for it next year, though. If it is a reasonable annual fee, I’ll be happy to add that onto my Google tab (along with my added storage and those international calls).

Read the rest.

Update: Just going through my bills right now and looked at my cell phone bill and there was one international call. A few days ago I called one of our partners in Australia and chatted for a grand total 8 minutes. The charge for that 8 minutes? $29.12. That same call in Google Voice would have cost $1.12.

Still trying to wrap my head around a $29.12 call that lasted only 8 minutes.