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There are versions for both Windows Mobile Standard and Pro and according to Skype calls can be made using either WiFi or 3G connections. I wonder if this new version is gentler on battery life than the older one? If anyone has tried it and can let us know please do.
When I recently interviewed Frank Meehan, GM of 3G Handsets and Products, Hutchinson Whampoa/3 at our Mobilize event, he kept coming back to a key point: people want to do anything and everything they can with their phones. It's not always about which handset has the most glitz and glamor, but about the services and value-adds that you can access with the device.
That might explain the news out of 3, the U.K. mobile carrier. They now offer SkypeOut calls on certain handsets at no additional charge, meaning you can use your traditional cell phone to call any other cell or landline number at Skype's per minute charges. In some cases, this might not make sense so you'll want to be up on the country costs in SkypeOut. At times though, this could save money on a per-minute basis depending on your plan and where you're calling.
Skype Journal says that 3 is supporting this on their two Skype-phones as well as certain Nokia E- and N-series devices, plus specific handsets from Sony Ericsson. There are nearly 20 devices eligible and I see that two LG phones made the list as well. Between UMA, or calls over WiFi and SkypeOut support, we're beginning to see an interesting shift away from traditional mobile voice offerings. Once we hit 4G, will voice simply be another data application as Barry West from Sprint suggested during the recent WiMAX launch in Baltimore? My gut says yes, and voice calls as we know them will be handled more over data pipes by 2013. Sounds far off, but it's not and you can see the building blocks taking shape now.
Update: Andy Abramson picked up on this news about two weeks ago and says he wouldn't be surprised to see a similar deal worked out in the U.S. with either AT&T or T-Mobile. I think it will be a while before that happens and not likely with T-Mo due to their UMA offerings, but Andy's finger is on the pulse of the VoIP industry.
Check the full interview for more of Frank's thoughts:
Windows folks might want to check in on the second beta for Skype 4.0 which is now available. When we looked at the first beta of 4.0, there was some valid debate on how much screen real estate the new version took. Many of us have moved to smaller-screened devices over the past several years and first beta brought a challenge with it's larger screen footprint.
The Skype team picked up on this feedback from many users and now offers a default "desktop" mode or a smaller, "compact" mode in Skype 4.0. You can quickly switch between views as needed. Also included are more options to resize the various windows such as the user information, video call and chat areas. All in all, sounds like this version might be more friendly to netbooks, UMPCs and small notebooks. Or at least as friendly as the prior version was, which didn't have a desktop view.
Need to make a call in pinch but your phone battery just gave out? Surely you've got a computer that's connected to the web somehow, right? If so, take a peek at IconDial in your browser-du-jour: it's a free web-service that uses Flash to make a free phone call without a download, sign-up, registration. Zip, zilch, nada. Seriously.
I tested a call earlier today and didn't notice any difference in the quality than I would from a SkypeOut call. The service appears to be in start-up mode so you'll only get a few minutes of free phone time, but IconDial plans to up the ante to 20-minutes in the future. How do they allow you to make a free phone call to anywhere in the world? I'll give you three guesses, but you likely need only one. Once you dial, you'll hear a short, five-second advertisement. It's a small price to pay in my book and sure beats trying to use a phone with a dead battery.
No doubt we like our Skype around here. It's a daily-use app for us to chat about mobile technology bits and to record videos of those conversations. I often overlook the many plug-ins and Lifehacker mentions a useful one that's apparently been around since the beginning of the year. It comes from Yugma, a web conference service provider and offers a way to share your desktop with a Skype caller on either Windows or Mac. The download is free for either platform.
If you're not a Skype user or want to host web conferences with up to ten of your best buds, you might want to check out Yugma's native service which is free. Adding more than ten attendees puts you in Yugma's professional category, which is $9.95 a month. However, that level adds some key services like recordings of the web conference, hosted playback, 100 MB of shared file space and more.
Last week, I took a look at TokBox with James. It's a Firefox extension that essentially attaches itself to the Facebook chat application. ToxBox uses Flash technology and offered us a nice side-by-side video chat (shown above) that would be great for our Geek Sessions, but performance wasn't even close to that of Skype. We experienced lags and sync issues between audio & video; just not good enough for our needs. Granted, we're trying to produce decent quality video broadcasts, so folks that just want a basic video web-client for their Facebook contacts might find this of use.
Got any web-based video-conference tools that we're missing and should be looking at? Seems to me there's room in the clouds for a good one and while I love the Skype client, it would be nice to see a web-based version. Then again, there might not be a need since you can run Skype on Windows, Mac, Linux, Nokia Internet Tablets and more... maybe I'm trying to hard on this one? Actually, since we're both smiling in the above video shot, maybe we're just having too much fun. ;)
The new Skype beta we told you about seems to have a lot of people unhappy due to the larger "conversation" window that takes up a lot of screen real estate. I've seen a number of people complain about this including Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern who is using Skype on a lot of those mini-notebooks with no screen real estate to spare. I decided to see what could be done about that large Skype window and I'm happy to report that shrinking it down to a proper size is very simple to do. First up, here's a screen snap of the default Skype beta with the main window shrunk as much as possible:
This was taken on screen with a screen resolution of 1280x768. The Skype window is still pretty big and it's easy to see why some are complaining about it. The problematic pane is the conversation pane on the right where Kevin's shadow is located. When in a video call this is where the video is displayed and when in a text chat that is displayed here. This pane in combination with the contacts pane on the left is what makes this new Skype window too large. I did some experimenting and discovered you can easily pop the conversation pane into a separate window all by itself:
As you can see this text chat pane is no bigger than the old Skype window and quite manageable. Paring the conversation pane out by itself is a simple matter of tapping the little round button in the upper right of the pane. When you hover over it Skype tells you the button will "show the conversation in a separate window". Once you have the chat window split off you can just minimize the main Skype window and it's totally out of the way. You can split the video window off the same way and shrink it down as small as you want and free up most of the screen for other things.
All of these screens were taken at 1280x768 resolution which is the primary advantage I find the HP Mini-Note has over other mini-notebooks. Part of the difficulty that others are having with screen real estate is due to most mini-notebooks, like the Asus EEE PC 1000h, only run at 1024x600 which is not big enough for multi-tasking like this.
Since reporting on the good results using the new Skype 4.0 beta for video calls yesterday I'm getting asked by many if it works well on the HP 2133 Mini-Note. You may recall that Skype video calls didn't work worth a flip on the Mini-Note running Vista but worked acceptably using the old version of Skype once I upgraded the Mini to WinXP. I felt the question about this new Skype beta was a good one so last night I installed it on the HP Mini-Note and gave it a try. I am happy to report that the quality of the video Skype chat with Kevin was acceptable and I found the video to be higher quality than the old version of Skype. There was a little bit of choppiness at the beginning of the call but Skype quickly settled down and there were no issues with the video and the audio quality was excellent. It may be my imagination but I believe this Skype beta even made Kevin appear more manly:
We've seen a few places on the intrawebs touting (and complaining) that the new Skype 4.0 beta's interface is a full screen window and that's not accurate. Kevin and I just had a video Skype session and the window is totally resizable like any other. The new Skype interface is a bigger window than the older one but it's totally resizable and in fact I found it very well done the way the video resizes with no lag. Here's a snap of the new interface:
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