Polycom Skype USB communicator

Polycom has introduced a range of USB communicator products like C100, C100S and CX100. These are slated to give you the ultimate high-fidelity hands-free experience from your PC, Skype or Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 respectively. The polycom communicator series has a great audio quality and the hands-free is good for even small conferences.

Skype is a free voip calling Instant Messenger client which can also be used to make calls to telephony users (for premium subscribers). As long as both the participants are on skype, its free. You have a global user directory, text chat, voice chat, video chat feature and you can have your own skype avataar (or upload your image onto skype). A little text bar against your avataar gives you a means to make a statement or add some cheeky, witty sentence to identify you among other users in a list. There is a history tab, flagged events list (like missed calls, etc) and a host of other features.

There a number of articles with reviews for both Polycom USB communicator

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/networking/0,1000000696,39279139,00.htm

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/index.php/taxid;2136212878;pid;2009;pt;1

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=227 (this article is a review about the C100S which is the one used with Skype).

The price for the Polycom USB communicator is listed as Rs.7740 which sounds a bit high as quoted in this article.

http://www.tech2.com/india/reviews/pc-accessories/polycom-communicator-c100s/1290/0

What many people may not know is that some part of the work for the Polycom USB communicator was done right here in the Polycom India R&D center in Hyderabad. This is a matter of pride for those who are associated with its development for delivering a world-class product.

Using Skype has its own disadvantages. Apart from the host of wonderful features provided by skype, what it does is it uses the Skype client's PC as a Supernode to help users behind a NAT/Firewall. What this does is it uses up a lot of bandwidth which may be premium at times. There are a number of articles on how not to be supernode. Beginning with Skype 3.0, disabling of supernode functionality is provided as posted at the skype site.
www.skype.com/security/universities/
You can search for Skype and Supernode if you want to browse articles that provide more insights in the Google toolbar provided below on this site. Happy Skyping!!!