Truphone - how does it work?
 

I just signed up for truphone. Live in USA & plan to use it on trip to South Africa with my iphone. (While in SA I do not plan to use ATT for making calls, only wifi)

When I have wifi connection I will be able to make a truphone call back to the USA from S.Africa. I am enrolled in trustandard & see this will cost approx 6cent a minute.
However, site says if I call another truphone subscriber the call will be free. How does this part work? I will be using a wifi connection but will be calling a truphone subscriber friend in the USA. They will probably answer my call using their regular cell phone service (ATT). Is the call free between truphone subscribers only when both parties are using wifi?

Calling another truphone customer means the other party must answer the call through the truphone software. Then the call is being routed completely over the internet and so free of charge.
Anyway it would be cheaper if you used fring, a software supporting all major instant messaging services and VoIP in one. fring is free of charge - you would just need some VoIP provider for calls to regular phone numbers. Therefore I would recommend poivy.com, who will give you free calls to the US for 90 days if you just top up $ 15. Those $ 15 will only be expended if you call a destination that is not free or if 90 days have passed after your last recharge.

if you already have iphone and you know and willing to use wifi, then just install skype, they provide the best quality over the net.

if you have some money in your skype account; then you can get skypeToGo number; this mean they give you local number from USA and you setting your friend number, so when he call to this number you wull get the call to your skype...

or sign to one of thier programs, few dolars and you talk unlimite.

I don't know how long you will be gone. If you plan a lot of calling and will have wifi access, you could get a T-Mobile US acct. w. unlimited calling for about $50/mo. Get one of their UMA enabled phones. Calls made over wifi from anywhere in the world - to and from U.S. numbers are included in your unlimited plan. With some UMA phones (TM Blackberrys are some) you can disable the ability to connect to a cell tower - thus avoiding accidentally connecting to an expensive roaming call.
For just incidental calling, I think until Google Voice makes their system easier to configure to use like Skype et al. - Skype is the way to go. TMobile is my everyday carrier, so we have used "free" wifi calling for a couple years from a dozen diff. countries, incl. S. Africa - JNB airport where we picked up a free wifi signal from one of the airlines.

...mike

It may be possible to use Google Voice to do what you want. I am not tech savy enough to know. GV does have apps for BB. They may have one for the Apple phone you have - but maybe not since Google and Apple are sometimes competing w. each other now. Using GV might have to be done via cell tower?

Apple wouldn't allow any Google Voice apps on the iPhone. GVDialer which made one had to close its shop in October because of this. There is a second program (not made by Google) which is still around but your phone has to be jailbroken:

Sean Kovacs GV Mobile

Google Voice is not VOIP exactly. It is more of a personal line, visual voicemail, and a call through service. You could hook it into Gizmo 5's VOIP service, but after Google about Gizmo, they temporarily stopped taking new accounts.

There are all sorts of VOIP clients for the iPhone over WiFi.