Nero's SIPPS Connect VoIP service is frustrating enough to make even Mother Teresa swear. If you can summon the patience to complete its mystifying configuration process, you must then steel yourself to deal with its inferior call quality and technical glitches. Worse, you're not rewarded with a particularly exceptional list of features in the end. Like Skype 2, Nero SIPPS Connect offers both free and paid services. Unfortunately for Nero, Skype 2 offers more robust capabilities. We advise you steer clear of Nero SIPPS Connect and veer toward Skype 2 instead, for both free and paid calls.
The Nero SIPPS Connect odyssey begins with its installation. If you plan to use the service for long-distance calling to analog or mobile phones, you may either pay US$24.99 to download a single license from Nero's Web site or plunk down US$29.99 to buy two licenses on CD. Unfortunately, the US$24.99 or US$29.99 covers only the Nero license(s), which gets you the user interface; you'll still have to sign up and pay for a calling plan with one of Nero's third-party providers. Nero recommends SipTalk, which will provide you with a phone number for incoming calls. If you're planning to use the free portion of the service, called SIPPS Free, solely to call other SIPPS Connect users, you'll be stumped about how to obtain the product, since Nero's site doesn't provide any obvious direction. After rooting around, we discovered that this user group must download the free trial version from Nero's Web site, wait for it to expire in 30 days, then indicate that they want to keep using its free version.
Actually installing the SIPPS Connect drivers and dashboard is simple enough, but configuring the service is an entirely different matter. Though a configuration wizard attempts to assist with this process, it's far too technical for the average user to understand. In a nutshell, the wizard prompts you either to establish a for-pay SipTalk account, which then enables you to place calls through the SipTalk gateway or, if you plan to use SIPPS Connect's free service, to enter your own gateway information (that is, your IP address) through which you'll make calls. And you can't consult a detailed user guide at this point, since access to the guide becomes available only after you've configured the service. No matter for newbies, because the complex guide would read a lot like mumbo jumbo to them anyway.
If you found the will to make it through the Nero SIPPS Connect configuration, you'll find a fairly average list of features. The dashboard provides the usual suspects, including a virtual keypad; microphone and headphone volume controls; and drop-down lists for outgoing calls and 10 quick-dial numbers. Should you find the dashboard's appearance too plain, you can spice it up with a skin. Clicking the address book icon opens your contact list in another window; you may then enter new individuals and groups, assigning numbers as well as IM handles -- though the service supports only AOL, ICQ, MSN, and Jabber. In addition, the dashboard provides icons for call forwarding, call holding, conference calling between three callers (Skype 2 lets you conference with up to five people, 10 if you have an Intel dual-core PC), and your voice mailbox, which also stores call recordings, should you choose to record a call.
If you've configured your SIPPS Connect service to use video calling, the dashboard includes a video-camera icon that you must click before placing or receiving a video-enabled call; a preview video feed from your camera will then appear in another window, and once you've established a connection with another video caller, that feed theoretically shows up in yet another window. Unfortunately, we were never able to establish a video feed in our anecdotal tests of calls between SIPPS Connect users. Though we succeeded several times in making a fairly clear, latency-free voice connection, our video calls eventually timed out for lack of connection. The same cannot be said for the voice quality we experienced in CNET Labs' tests of SIPPS Connect calls to analog lines. Both callers heard intermittent static, feedback, and break-ups, with these problems worsening during data downloads and uploads.
In light of SIPPS Connect's many issues, the least Nero could do is offer telephone support for the product. However, its support consists only of what you can find on its Web site, which includes a knowledge base, a forum, FAQs and a form that you can fill out to receive answers via e-mail.
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