I tried the new beta of the Yahoo Messenger with Voice 2 nights back. It offers a Phone Out feature which lets me call a regular telephone number from my computer, which is what I was impressed with. The quality was clear and the other party was able to hear me quite alright too.

There is also a Phone In feature where you get assigned a telephone number so people can call you at a number as opposed to your computer only. I did not try that and I am not truly interested in it much.

And best of all, Voice Mail is free! So if I am offline, someone can leave me a voice mail, just like their offline message (text) capability.

I also uninstalled Skype at the same time. I do not need so many clients on my computer. As it is, I have friends and family spread over Yahoo, MSN and AIM. Now I have Skype ID’s to remember and maintain. I won’t be doing that. Since Yahoo and MSN have a partnership, Yahoo claims that soon we will be able to chat with MSN members from the Yahoo interface. So I will end up with only 2 clients on the computer - Yahoo and AIM.

Yahoo already has so many other Yahoo services linked into the messenger - Launch music, Games, Webcam, Finance, etc. It makes sense to keep using it for everything.