Maybe the most important phone call made between Estonia and Japan is the one that earlier this month hooked up Skype, the popular purveyor of free Internet calls, and Panasonic, the Godzilla of gadget manufacturers. Panasonic's hefty marketing muscle will probably push Skype phones closer to the mainstream, but so far any details on products have been nonexistent even though the deal is a month old. Still, a clue as to how a Panasonic-Skype phone would probably work can be gleaned from this $140 cordless model from Olympia, dubbed the Dual Phone 3055. You just plug the phone's base station into a wall jack and then make a second connection to your PC's USB port. A display on the handset lets you see if any of your Skype buddies are online, and if they are, all you do is press a green button to make a free Skype call. Otherwise, the phone operates like any other cordless model. We hope the Panasonic model will have the same plug-and-dial simplicity, because you know no one's going to read the manual. — Frank Vizard