I’ve been living without a landline for a couple of years now and just using my cell phone however I’m a bit of a cheap bastard and only have about 250 minutes a month. Most months thats more than enough since I don’t really talk on the phone that much however when some sort of parental tech support issue comes up I can burn through the minutes pretty quick.
Lately with my Mom I’ve been using iChat’s audio capabilities and its worked great. Both my Mom and I have the older titanium PowerBooks with the built in mic and the auto quality is excellent, not to mention that my hands are free to click around and look stuff up while I help her out.
Unfortunately my Mom is the only other macophile in the family so when my Dad called looking for some Linux help last night we ended up turing to Skype to save on the minutes. The sound quality wasn’t nearly as good as the iChat conversations I had had but that could have been due to the cheap headset my Dad had.
Wanna use iChat/Skype to get ahold of me? I’ll update my about page with my account info…