Skype for iPhone officially official!

After my previous post on Skype’s SIP plans, I criticized them for there slow adaption of mobile platforms. Well, seems they have finally listened to their users, and they are releasing Skype for iPhone tomorrow and for Blackberry in May! iPhone and Blackberry users might actually expand the product’s reachability because these users are typically early adopters. (Not that Skype is in any way a early adopter’s tool…)

Well initial previews of the app reveal the following – the Contacts on the iPhone will be integrated with the app, so the application will not only remember its own contact list. Hopefully it will auto add skype contacts already in your contacts? They have also sticked to the tried and tested iPhone OS interface guidelines, so it looks good as well (take note Fring and Nimbuzz). The application will also feature better voice quality than Nimbuzz or Fring, seeing as it will not have the latency of the reverse engineered codecs.

Now for the bad news: The application is Wifi only. So countries who have unlimited 3G access will just have to suck it, we in South Africa are used to expensive 3G. So no difference to us. Skype for iPhone will also not have access to value added services like Voicemail and SMS, and users will not be able to access the monetary side of their accounts. But SkypeOut is available

Here is how the app can become perfect – give me landscape keyboard for IM and integrate it properly with iPhone 3.0 (notification please sir).

Sources: Wired, Gizmodo

Skype finally getting a bit more open? No wait, not really.

Skype might be one of the most popular instant message and VoIP clients on the market today (they recently clocked in 17 million online at once). But their innovation has been slowing down in recent years – while they might have been developing their voice quality, and give better video quality, they have been turning a blind eye to many trends that are occurring around them.

Best example of this is the mobile space – true, they made a Windows Mobile client available, but the interface is bad and the software is buggy, as is the case with most Windows Mobile applications. They ignored other platforms like Symbian (which is by far the most popular) and iPhone OS, which would trigger much bigger uptake seeing as many early adopters run these other two mobile OS’s. Windows Mobile users are more likely to be user’s forced by their corporate environment to use WM because it (wrongly so) gives the best Exchange support.
But their most significant flaw has been their reluctance to open up the Skype API to other companies. True, applications like Fring and Nimbuzz can make Skype calls, but they had to reverse engineer the standard in order for it to run. While Skype voice calls might have been something we would have all liked to access on a variety of platforms, they also prevented text chatting between different platforms (for example MSN to Skype), and users had to use “in between” clients like Adium and Digsby (which are both excellent by the way).

But luckily they woke up this week with a significant new announcement – Skype is going to start supporting SIP standards. Session Initiation Protocol is a open standard which is currently used by many in-office voice over IP systems. The new service will enable people to make calls from their office VoIP phones to any other regular or cellular phone at Skype’s cheap SkypeOut prices. (for example your office might decide that all outgoing call traffic to cellular phones go through a central SkypeOut account which can save quite a lot on phone bills).
The service will initially only be available in public beta, available at http://skype.biz

So if your business makes a significant amount of outside (especially overseas) calls, consider it. For consumers, Skype is also making available SFS (Skype for SIP) which enables you to connect you Skype name to a SIP IP address, therefore making you reachable by SIP wherever you might be connected to the web. Also, your SIP phone will ring when users contact your Skype address.

Whatever the news, I cant help thinking that maybe Skype needs to address its more urgent concerns of a open API and addressing the mobile space.

PS: Whatever happened to the story that Skype will communicate with Google Talk clients natively?

Update: Well, Skype did finally decide to release a Skype client for iPhone and Blackberry.