VoxOx Is Like Digsby Plus Skype

Windows/Mac OS X only: Free application VoxOx is a combination of popular multi-protocol chat and social networking application Digsby and voice chat service Skype—or at least that’s the idea. VoxOx claims to combine all of “today’s main forms of communication into one snazzy interface.” To its credit, VoxOx does offer a lot of worthwhile functionality. Like Digsby, it works with most popular IM networks, integrates with Facebook (though not MySpace or LinkedIn, which Digsby supports), and offers email integration. Like Skype, VoxOx gives you a phone number and allows you to make outgoing calls to any other phone and receive calls from your computer (you’ll get a free phone number and 120 free minutes when you sign up). VoxOx even does video conferencing, call forwarding, file sharing, and integrated text messaging. Sounds pretty good, right?

On the flip side, there are a lot of drawbacks to VoxOx. First—and feel free to disagree with me on this—the design is sort of atrocious. The app looks nothing like the rest of the applications running on your computer, which means it sticks out like a sore thumb on your desktop. The VoxOx home screen is a weird iPhone rip-off, and beyond that, the interface is clunky and uncomfortable. Second, VoxOx isn’t terribly easy on your system memory—eating about 90MB idle. That 90MB grows dramatically each time you tackle a new task with VoxOx.

That said, VoxOx does a integrate virtually every form of popular communication, which will attract some users. It doesn’t do convergence nearly as well as Digsby, though, and I suspect that a lot of people would prefer actually running Digsby and Skype at the same time rather than deal with the kitchen sink approach of VoxOx. Love it or hate it, let’s hear your thoughts on VoxOx in the comments.