The Google Talk webpage is live (shown above) so get your download and check it out. Installation was painless and trouble-free.

Interface is a bit bare bones at the moment. I had Jowl download so we could run a quick demo. Note the presence of “beta” in the picture below. I noticed that it immediately started checking my Gmail inbox and popping a nice balloon above the system tray with the incoming messages (see bottom of screenshot below):

At first neither Jowl or I could get any sound with our VoIP call, but after some repeated callbacks (no changes to microphone/record settings on either end) we finally got sound with a connection.

We were able to chat in the window while talking. The sound broke up intermittently while I was using FTP and then got itself back together. I noticed some rather severe system slowdown issues after a minute or two of chatting and the audio broke up again (server issues?). The sound turned to constant breakup. Wasn’t a bandwidth crunch on our end as the pipe was rocking along. All in all, sound quality was very good and on par with Skype when it worked. It’s very early beta so I’m sure it will get better, but the first test wasn’t all that positive.

I’m sure once Google works out the scaling on this stuff it will be much smoother but right now I wouldn’t expect it to compare to Skype. A lot of features in Skype aren’t present like dial a POTS line or SkypeIN (calling from voice to a phone number), voicemail, conference calling, etc — all features Google Talk will need to add to become a real contender in this space long term, but they are off to an OK start. Also what about an API? Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m being impatient, it just got released! But these are things other folks will compare it to. Beta doesn’t mean what it used to mean. People expect more from any public release.

• KaZaA maker beta tests new voice P2P system: Skype
• Skype logins hosed at the moment, just keep client running
• Skype automatic contact syncing in version 1.2 beta
• Skype VoIP adds conference calling
• Skype tops 16,000 users online and 240,000+ downloads
• Skype 1.1 (BETA) contains group IM chat