Skype and Nokia announced on Tuesday a colaboration agreement to work together in the incorporation of Skype application on Nokia devices. This concerns Nseries devices, having Nokia N97 as first device to incorporate it, which is planned to be released on 3Q 2009. N97 will incorporate Skype as a new feature of the Guide section, where we will be able to check if our contacts are connected to Skype and even use the IM system.
This involves that Nokia users will be able to speak among them for free if they are connected to a WLAN or only paying the cellular operator for the 3G service. In this second case, people who have a plain-rates contract (usual case in mobile-internet users) will never be charged for those additional calls, so it is like they talk “for free”. Even the kind of 3G contracts that decrease the bandwidth to 128kbps doesn’t signify a drawback cause that BW is enough to transmit VoIP calls. Skype also allows to make calls to mobile phones and land lines at low rates.
Skype has 400 million users, since the beginning of the project in 2003. This and the big impact Nokia has on mobile world can make this agreement a real triumph and a new feature for mobile tech users who will take it really glad.
The competitor: Fring
We can say that they have a competitor, Fring, which is not new. The big difference is that its application supports multiple IM accounts (MSN, Google Talk, AIM, SIP, Facebook, Twitter…), including Skype. So it also allows making calls via Skype or any SIP/VoIP account, which opens the functionality of the app to almost any user. So this is also a similar solution, and also free, but multiaccount and which supports the open protocol SIP. So this gives the user Skype functionality and more.
Since its beginning Fring application has increased the supported devices, including WM, iPhone, Symbian, UIQ, Linux and J2ME devices. So they reach any user.
Trend?
All this is not just a new functionality on mobile devices. We are talking about that any person with a mobile device and a Skype account or a free SIP account can talk for free to other mobile users and at really low rates to mobiles and land lines. Just using WLANs or data plans. This means if our mobile telephony contracts just included data plans (3G, GPRS, …), and no calling plans (GSM …) the trend would be to use those data plans to call via SIP/Voip/Skype, which is cheaper than tradiotional calls.
We’ll see…
April 7th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
[...] time we have installed the application Fring on a HTC Touch Cruise 2. This app, as we already posted, allows us to use different accounts (MSN, Google Talk, AIM, SIP, Facebook, Twitter, Skype) from [...]
November 14th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
skype