Skype comes to the iPhone, but does AT&T care…yet?
At the crack of midnight, iPhone geeks on the east coast of the United States got their first crack at Skype’s official app for the iPhone. If you don’t know, Skype allows voice calls over the internet without having to use an actual telephone, the audio is transferred over the internet (voice over IP, or VOIP). Skype had been out for the PSP for some time now, but very few people I know actually used it. Last night, as the clock crept past midnight, my list of logged in friends on Skype kept getting bigger and bigger as people were trying it out on their iPhones.
It was late, so I only tried it with two friends briefly. One friend was in Florida, the other in California. In both cases, the audio quality was very, very good. You could tell it was a tad more compressed than a regular phone call, but the audio was still very clear and easy to understand. Both friends were also on Skype for the iPhone.
As great as this is, I don’t think AT&T has anything to worry about in the short term. Skype won’t work over Edge or 3G, so the only way you’re going to use this is over WiFi. Not many people have portable WiFi hotspots on them and bouncing between public, open spots while traveling, if they exist, won’t make for a good experience.
So really, the only place this will work for you is in an area with good WiFi, and this has to be the only application you have running on your iPhone/iPod Touch if you want people to spontaneously call you. Since Apple’s push technology won’t be in the iPhone OS until 3.0 in June, there’s no way for the iPhone to tell you that there’s a call coming in if Skype isn’t running all the time. If it is, this will drain your battery unless you keep your iPhone plugged in. Until then, you’ll have to rely on setting up calls manually.
I think this is a step in the right direction for VOIP calls, we just need a better infrastructure here in the U.S. for this to be a practical mobile solution. When that happens, I’m sure Skype will be there.
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