IPi Phone

Communication is one of the main activities that have been greatly enhanced by the Internet, allowing you to get in touch with virtually anyone around the world, as long as there's an active connection. There are an abundance of tools you can use to get in touch with acquaintances, with IPi Phone being dedicated to LAN communication.

Equipped with a highly-intuitive and modern interface, the application gets you up and running in a jiffy. General details are displayed, such as connection time, your IP and name details, sliders for input and output volume, as well as quick access buttons to major functions.

As the name suggests, the application establishes a connection between one or more IP addresses so that you can initiate a voice call, chat session or send files within a private group. Setting up a connection requires both users to have the application installed.

Needless to say that you need to provide the target user's IP address, as well as a port to connect through. Speed can also be set to several types such as dialup, ISDN, cable or LAN. What's more, there's also the possibility to enhance security with a password and even tick an option that modifies your voice when voice calling.

Paying a visit to the settings menu lets you further increase security by setting up a proxy connection, with the possibility to enable HTTP tunneling.

You are not simply limited to issuing voice calls, with support for text chats as well. Files can also be sent to users in an active session, and it's a neat feature since it's mostly oriented towards LAN use. Although there's a real time updating log of your activities, there's no integrated function to create a contacts list or save frequently dialed IP addresses.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that IPi Phone is a powerful LAN chat utility with clever options for voice and text communication, as well as support for file sharing. The intuitive design gets you quickly up and running, while the amount of system resources used makes it compatible with a wide array of configurations.