Yaffle's Corner

You may have read in the press the arguments that have been occurring between Fring and Skype. You can find The Register's article on the subject here.

In any event, this has (largely) rendered my copy of Fring useless as what I use it for mainly these days is to make the odd Skype call - after all - I have a good balance left which I don't wish to lose.

Fortunately, I read on All About Symbian that a new version of Skype for Symbian had been released which had a rather lower memory footprint, so this lunch time I downloaded it.

It appears to be not bad, the call quality is good and I tested it against a switchboard. Fring had only recently included DTMF capability in their software, even after all these years, and it was still limited to the * and # buttons. Numbers were not possible. Its as simple as pi with the Skype app which just uses the phone's own dialler, just like when you're making a call over the mobile network.

One other nice thing, when you fire up the Skype Client it warns you about data charges over 3G networks and suggests you either get an unlimited data tariff or join a WiFi network. Needless to say, I'm using it over my Wifi network at the moment.

One thing I'm unable to test at the moment is whether it receives incoming calls any better than Fring did.

You may recall I tested a SkypeIn number with Fring about a year ago and whilst the call eventually came through, most callers were fed up of the ring tone and gave up. I always put that down to the Fring gateway being slow. So I'd be interested to know from anyone using the native Skype app. and who has a SkypeIN number how well it works.