Also fixes half a dozen issues relating to contacts and video playback

Aug 31, 2012 07:56 GMT  ·  By

The code-savvy team of engineers at Skype have a new update ready for Android customers. Skype 2.9 arrives with improved Bluetooth support, as well as with the usual bag of fixes for some known issues.

Raul Liive blogging for Skype notes that Bluetooth devices connected to Android phones will exhibit improved audio quality, as well as reduced delay.

“In the new release, we have improved our support for Bluetooth devices improving audio quality, reducing delay, fixing some issues and ensuring that Bluetooth icon info is always accurate,” says Liive.

Although improving Bluetooth seems to have been the centerpiece of this release, the bug fixes incorporated in Skype 2.9 for Android are just as important, if not more so.

For instance, on some devices running older versions of Skype, contacts were not synced with the device's contact list. Now they are.

In some instances, Skype stalled while responding to a contact search request, or was unable to open received files. These errors have been corrected as well.

Skype would sometimes log off for no reason and video calls on some Android 2.2 devices were not working. Both these issues are addressed in Skype 2.9.

Two more video bugs are documented in the “fixed issues” section in the release notes. On some devices, video was blurrier than on previous versions of Skype. Samsung Infuse in particular exhibited an extra bug – the image was rotated by 180 degrees.

Finally, on a few devices with Qualcomm chipsets the video looked black or green. All these nasty bugs are now gone, says Liive.

As usual, some issues linger still. Audio call volume could be low on some devices, and video could be upside down on a few others, according to the documentation for Skype 2.9. For this particular issue, users can control the Video Rotation in the settings panel.

When switching incoming and outgoing video display, video is turned off in some instances. Finally, users may see a black picture when returning to video call either from phone call or after sending Skype to the background. Simply restart the Skype call to work around this bug, says Liive.