Mr Pogue over at the New York Times has picked up on Cubic, a new mobile service which aims to let people make international calls for the cost of local calls. It’s not content, but it is interesting—especially for those of us who travel a fair bit or have families overseas. The people behind it run a calling card business, and seem to have had the brainwave that calling cards would be easier to use if they had a phone attached (and customers would be less likely to go with one of the other calling card companies). It works by giving customers local numbers in as many countries as they want, and then connecting calls over the internet. “When you dial a number and press send, your phone rings a few seconds later. When you answer, you hear a voice saying, “Connecting your call,” and then you hear the other person answer…it also adds about 25 seconds of waiting to every call. It helps if you keep chanting: “90 percent savings, 90 percent savings.”

The phone costs $140 and doesn’t seem to be very good, although it does have WiFi connectivity (“for a flat $42 a month, you can turn on its unlimited Wi-Fi calling option. It lets you receive unlimited unmetered calls to any numbers in the world from Internet hot spots, or make them for a penny a minute. Either way, you have little fear of racking up your bill”). You can also choose to just get the GSM SIM card for $40 and stick it in a different handset.