Last week’s Skype outage brought a lot of things to perspective,People who use it for business (read serious stuff) were screaming at Skype for dropped calls and the service being down for a freaking 24 hours!!, I was there too when it happened. Thankfully this happened when the meeting was almost ending.
The Skype Video calling for iPhone is happening sooner than earlier expected (CES 2011).
Skype 3.0 for iOS devices contains Video calling support for iPhone4, 3GS. You should be able to have one way video conferencing for other iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone Touch 3rd Generation). Go grab some real Face time from outside at least now will you?
No news on when the same features will be available for Android or other “not-so-popular” mobile operating systems.
But I am guessing soon as most of the new phones have a front video camera.
UPDATE: We tried it over WiFi and the experience is unfortunately not as good as FaceTime. This might be an infrastructure issue as I assume everyone with an iOS device will be trying this out now. Maybe we will have a better experience in a few days when the joy calls are done. Also, FaceTime has limited set of users as its currently only possible between Apple devices, that too over WiFi. However, the fact that we can now video chat over 3G network is good enough reason for us to smile and love our iOS devices even more. We know that there were apps like Tango which have been there for some time now, but those involved both the parties having the app on their devices. Skype is an app that everyone probably already has.
And here is a video from skype showcasing the new version:
MORE UPDATE: A 1 minute video call over 3G using Skype 3.0 on your iPhone 4 will take 3.4 MB of data. Thanks to 9to5mac for this info.
[Via Engadget]
