Skype to Equip S60 Phones

Skype has announced a partnership with Hutchinson to place Skype on mobile phones on the 3G networks worldwide. Although Skype refused to specify the handsets on which it will run, Nokia presented two 6680 phones operational with a demo of the program.

The S60 Skype application supports Skype text chat, Skype voice calls (both to PCs and to other S60 handsets), Skype Out dialing and runs on the Symbian platform. Tests on 3G revealed latencies of about one second, but it has been suggested that better performance could be achieved on a WiFi connection. The quality of the call was similar to that of a normal call.

The application has been developed for S60 second edition, but Skype is working on a third edition product, which is normal if we take into account the availability of WiFi in the N80 and E series phones.