.Dust

Finally Skype has released a mobile client for their service.

This is great news. You will be able to access Skype ser­vices while you are hit­ting the road with­out hav­ing to be a 3 cus­tomer in Europe or fir­ing up your lap­top in a WiFi cov­ered area

You will finally be free from you mobile phone plan and you will be able to talk and chat for free forever!

Sure?

As always, you need to be very care­ful about the above state­ment. There are a lot of bad things you may find while using this service.

Here is a small list of things I do not per­son­ally like about this appli­ca­tion and the related service:

• In sev­eral coun­tries you will have to use SkypeIn in order to receive calls. That basi­cally means it will cost you money
• When you will orig­i­nate a voice call you will use your Skype­Out credit. More­over since the client does not imple­ment a real VoIP solu­tion your call will be routed trough a stan­dard voice call from your mobile oper­a­tor. That means that you will con­sume your Skype­Out credit and on top you will be billed for a stan­dard voice call as per your car­rier plane. Def­i­nitely not cheap.
• When you will use Skype Chat you will pay accord­ing to your data traf­fic plan. Just as an exam­ple there are plans that makes you pay a fee as soon as a data con­nec­tion is set up. Again, a lot of money.
• Since the appli­ca­tion is a stan­dard J2ME appli­ca­tion it will not be pos­si­ble to have it run­ning in back­ground. (Well on some mobile phones it will be pos­si­ble but they are a few) This means that you will always need to have your appli­ca­tion run­ning in the fore­ground con­sum­ing bat­tery power at a much faster rate com­pared to the idle state. More­over your con­tact list will be con­stantly updated over a data con­nec­tion cost­ing you money.

I think there is enough to stay away from this appli­ca­tion unless you have a very good voice and data plan from your carrier.

For the time being I think I will stay with my 3 SkypePhone.

I am sus­pect­ing that the Skype guys are try­ing to bring in some money from this ini­tia­tive. Unfor­tu­nately it seems that they are not talk­ing with mobile oper­a­tors and, as I said in the past, the truth is that “Who owns the (U)SIM owns the cus­tomer”. And this is still true.

Related posts:

1. The Inter­net in your phone
2. Let The Cus­tomer Choose
3. Stream­ing Video Right From Your Phone With QIK
4. 3 Launches The Skypephone
5. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star