It’s been on the hype wagon for a while, but now it appears to be here…almost. Netgear have demo’d a Skype phone at CES: “There are currently only 10 working units in existence, but news on availability will surface some time in the first quarter of 2006. All Netgear are saying about cost is that it will be ‘very competitively priced’.”
The software is preloaded onto the handset and basically allows Skype calls from Wi-Fi access points. Of course this needs a pretty well-covered wi-fi area to be useful, unless it also has some form of mobile connection, but the story doesn’t indicate whether that’s the case. The Press Release doesn’t mention it either, so I’m guessing it’s not the case. You’ll also need free wi-fi access to make “free” calls. The other thing to remember is that Skype calls to mobile phones are at times charged at a long-distance rate, which is fine for Skype users but very bad for the person receiving the call in markets where people pay to receive calls. I’m talking from my experience in Mexico.
More disappointingly, the article didn’t mention anything about any other capabilities of the phone. If the device is designed to connect via wi-fi points with their much higher connection speed it makes sense to make the devices as robust as possible, since content would be so much easier and cheaper to load.
I’m happy for the Skype phone, but I don’t think it will become really useful until it has dual-connection capabilities and some pretty nifty hardware and software for utilising content on the handset…(via Textually)
Related stories:
–The End Of Handset Subsidies?
–Mobile Skype By Mid-2006
–Musings On Skype
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