Skype iPhone update: Multitasking, no additional charges for calling over 3G | Hacker News Reader

Skype iPhone update: Multitasking, no additional charges for calling over 3G

blogs.skype.com

39 pointsssclafani20 comments

"In light of that, we no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G."

I think this is huge. Mobile networks still charge 2$+ per minute for international calls. This basically makes it irrelevant.

depending on your subscription (and country), they will charge you way more than $2 per minute in data traffic though.

Voice is bandwidth intensive.

I'm in Europe and bandwidth costs are relatively insignificant (as long as you don't travel abroad). Data roaming is whole different story, I really hope European Union will do something about it.

yesterday I did a bit of research. I reset my iphone's data counter and hold a 2 minute skype call over 3g with my girlfriend. We held a normal conversation with both of us talking.

After two minutes, I sent out 652 KB of data and received 798 KB.

So this means that a minute of data is around 750KB.

My mobile subscription (Swisscom) comes with 250MB of inclusive data for CHF 35/month (around $35 or EUR 25).

With 750KB per minute, I can in theory talk for around 5.5 hours if I do nothing but Skype. My current data usage is around 50 MB/month, which leaves 200 MB unused which then is good for 4 hours of talk time.

Not bad.

I would have thought that a Skype conversation uses way more bandwidth than it apparently does.

Welcome to non-unlimited data plans, where AT&T is motivated to support and maintain towers and actively wants to encourage developers to do awesome things with bandwidth. I'm super excited about how awesome developing for handsets is going to be now that we got rid of that screwed up set of misincentives.

I don't understand why they never supported push notifications, it would have worked almost as well, and probably conserved battery. Seems like the ideal use case for push notifications.

Push notifications are definitely something that is still missing from skype.

Multitasking allows you to use other apps while talking over skype, but as skype can be killed any time because of low memory situations, there is no way around push notifications for an always on experience on the iPhone.

I guess it's because of their network architecture. They probably need major changes in the way they initiate calls to make this possible.

Push notifications aren't reliable enough to be available during the brief period when a person is calling. A push notification that is set to go out at 9am might go out at 9am, but it also might go out at 9:01, 9:02, etc. My guess is that this is why Skype doesn't use them.

I love skype on the iPhone - the audio quality is so much better than normal phone calls (at least on AT&T in New York) it blows me away... even over 3G.

I could not get it to reliably ring (at least when using SkypeIn). Otherwise, hooray! Wonder what the effects will be on battery life?

Already have my answer - started at 100% at noon, but 6pm, down to 32%.

Just for clarity, how many hours did you lose?

Normally 100% at 8:30am, then 40% by 11pm.

wow

Wheres the iPad app?....

Skype is available and works great on the iPad -- but Apple hasn't enabled multitasking there yet. "Fall", they say.

It works on the ipad, but it looks horrible. It's also hard to type on the iphone keyboard.

Too bad they don't have a generally available android version.

Now they just need integration with the rest of the phone (make skype calls from the phone app, from contacts list, etc) and they'll be caught up to where the Nokia N900 has been for a year!

What a revolution Apple.

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