Like many others outside the United States, I too was wondering how to get my hands on the cool call phone feature which Gmail introduced recently for its US users. There were reports that if you set your Gmail language settings to English(US), it should work. And yes, it did for many. But not for me (and for many others).
So, while hunting for a workaround, I thought why not try one of the free VPN clients we mentioned in our hide IP and browse securely article, and see if getting a US based IP address is all that’s needed. And guess what, it worked like a charm!
Here’s what I did.
1. Signed out of Gmail.
2. Fired up my favorite VPN client and got myself a US IP address.
3. Signed back into Gmail, and found a nice “Call Phone” option in the chat column.
It worked for me so I am assuming it should work for many others out there. Try it out and let me know if it does.
Also, it should be noted that as soon as I disconnected from the VPN and came back to my original connection, the call phone option was gone. So this isn’t a permanent thing and would require you to stay connected using the VPN.
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Written By Abhijeet and published on Monday, August 30th, 2010. Abhijeet Mukherjee is the founder and editor of Guiding Tech.
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