i haven't been posting reviews here lately, been busy with work but now i'm back!

since Rej was out of the country last month we had to find ways to communicate without resorting to expensive international calls by phone. of course my primary thought was to use Skype on the triple E. i recently upgraded to the latest version of skype for linux via the terminal, but that was originally made for standard debian linux distro, on which the triple E's Xandros is based, it worked quite well, shortly after, Asus released an update designed for the xandros OS that was pretty much the same. this activated the webcam functionality on the voice chat of Skype.

so as soon as Rej got to Perth in Western Australia, we tried out Skype, she was using Windows XP on her laptop and i had to go to lug my triple E to Fandom Cafe since the internet access at Rej's house was down. while text chatting doesn't normally need high bandwidth to function, voice chat is a different animal altogether. especially when coupled with video conferencing. the problem with simultaneous voice and video chat is that it uses up a lot of your available bandwidth and CPU processing power, if you are talking while surfing then your transmission usually starts to get choppy, i'd advise you to just stick to the voice communication, close other programs and leave the rest for later especially if you're surfing memory intensive sites like youtube or other Flash heavy pages.

At that time we were using skype, i was at an internet cafe where the bandwidth would be shared with other users, sometimes the audio would cut out on my end or there would be a significant lag on her end. otherwise, its still possible to carry a decent conversation as long as you don't get annoyed at the intermittent audio. patience is a virtue. you end up saying “Are you there?” or “i can hear you now” quite often.

we also tried voice chat using a USB headset, unfortunately the Xandros OS didn't recognize the peripheral so it didn't work. the built in mic and speakers of the triple E are mostly sufficient for voice chat, however, you have to keep the speaker volume down or else the one you are talking to will get feedback or an echo on their end. i hope they eventually supply drivers for the USB headset, it will be great for recording voice emails and podcasting on the triple E.

eventually we ended up going back to windows XP and using Yahoo Messenger for voice chat, its more convenient and can handle more processes running while you're having a voice conversation. its also nicer to use a USB headset since the analog voice to digital signal processing is done by the headset instead of the internal processor of the soundcard or the CPU, this makes it less memory intensive thus there is less lag in the conversation.

I'm still waiting for an upgrade to the Pidgin application so it would support voice chat as well as text. webcam capability is secondary.