I used Skype to keep in contact with my sweetie Lisa at home when I went overseas to Israel for a week. If you both download Skype (as we did), and use it over the Internet instead of the phone system, it's absolutely free. We both have laptops with built-in webcams and microphones, so it was essentially a picturephone. I was able to give Lisa a tour of Israeli friends' gardens, and Lisa showed me my mail. The quality goes off from time to time, the voice gets tinny. but it's not too bad, and well worth the price :-) You need to be in places with WiFI, or some other Internet connection; fortunately, all of my friends had neighbors with unprotected/unshielded WiFi networks. Since we haven't set up accounts tot connect via phone lines, Sjype has no billing information for either of us, and therefore couldn't charge us if they wanted to.

--Charlie Baum