Mobile Ministry Magazine

One of the recent lessons learned hands-on has been that of international calling. It seems to me that for the most part, the phone carriers really do win out here by being able to charge high for even the smallest calls. For this reason, many have resorted to using services such as Skype in order to make international phone calls as it uses the Internet, and works out to being far cheaper than other means of calling internatinally.

Palm Addict posted today of a solution also in this respect that works with Treo devices (as well as other mobile phones which have a data connection) called Mino. Founded in 2004, Mino is a voice over IP (VoIP) based service and application that leveerages the data connection of the mobile device in order to make international phone calls.

Mino requires the use of a free java application that you would download to your device (PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, TabletPC, and PSP are supported; if you have a Treo, then you would need to download the Java client from Palm in order to use this and any other Java application on your Treo). And basically from there you are using your data service in order to make and recieve phone calls. This cuts down the cost of a call almost 80% in some applications.

Read more about Mino and whether it is something that works for your phone. Also, if you are sending a missions team to another country, adding Mino and an international data plan is a really good way to save on keeping them connected while abroad.