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Free Skype Client Lands On the iPhone
CNet is reporting that a free Skype client will finally be landing on the iPhone this week. Unfortunately some are saying that it seems many of the "critical" pieces of functionality are still missing. While the Skype engineers claim their native client will offer better audio quality (because there is no need to route through another server and transcode audio) they are still missing text messaging, file transfers, and integrated voice mail. Since the iPhone does not allow for multiple programs running concurrently, many are expecting existing multi-function apps like Fring and NimBuzz to continue their reign at the top.
If this is so it will not last long, AT&T will make sure of that in the States.
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
It's an arbitrary restriction and only applies to third-party apps. The aim is to avoid third-party apps draining the battery by doing a lot of things in the background, or preventing other things from working by using all of the RAM (the iPhone doesn't enable swapping, I believe).
In theory, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the whole philosophy of the iPhone is that Apple knows better than the owner of the device (which is probably true in the case of a lot of the users...) so there is no way of overriding this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And this Skype client will never be full-featured because it would take revenue away from the phone company, who profits by selling voice plans. You might be thinking a data-only plan with a Skype client would save you money, but you'd be wrong: Apple doesn't want you to do that. AT&T doesn't either. Or any other wireless provider. Sure, we could invest in a decent wireless data architecture, but why do that when we know we can keep bumping up prices and not improving infrastructure, and then blaming "high consumption users" for the problem. You will pay, like the good consumer you are. Oh yes, you will pay.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Skype will only use the WiFi network, not the 'unlimited' ATT data plan so you will only be able to use it while tethered to a local hotspot, not out roaming in the wild. ATT and Apple protect their revenue and force you to use your paid minutes instead of the 'unlimited' data plan that you are paying big bucks for...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You mean the iphone does not have a command line, weak! BTW, does android have a CLI?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
iPhones can run multiple apps, but the public SDK does not allow developers to write apps that run in the background. Apple can certainly write apps that run in the background, though. The music service, for one. The phone service, etc. Additionally, developers for jailbroken phones can run applications in the background because they're not constrained by the official SDK.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
(the iPhone doesn't enable swapping, I believe).
That is correct. The iPhone's virtual memory model does not include swapping.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Will you be able to receive Skype calls without the app running?
no
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Does if you root it.
(Which is easy and takes about 15 minutes and no I'm not going to provide a link. Google is your friend. :P)
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
It depends on what you are looking for. I got a Windows Mobile phone because i wanted office integration. I tried using the web browser for playing, I've used Google maps. I sync e-mail using Intellisync software.
After a little over two years, I'm ready for an iPhone. Why? The Internet browsing experience is better. I rarely use the office apps. I use Word to jot notes down, I can use the appropriate program on the iPhone for this purpose. I tried using Excel, the cell size is so small it is practically useless. With an iPhone I can VNC my desktop and use Excel from their on a largers screen with zoom functionality. That's better than my WM experience.
Copy and paste is coming and it's the only feature I'd really want. Tethering is again coming. MMS I could care less about personally.
Since the iPhone does not allow for multiple programs running concurrently
What's the point of including multitasking if you cannot make it pretty and shiny? I applaud Apple for continuing the fight to keep our lives pretty and shiny rather than attempting to make our lives more efficient and easier to manage. I mean, let's be serious, isn't shiny and pretty the real reason we carry personal digital devices.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Can someone explain to me why I'd want to make a phone call over a crappy VOIP system from a cell phone that I bought to be able to uh .. make phone calls?
This is partly in agreement with my (brother?) post, but the iPhone also has a command line, if jailbroken.
I'll just keep using Skype with my Windows Mobile phone, then, which, by the way, lets me use it on the data network. (I've never tried, because we only have EDGE in my area) I'm not bashing either Skype or Apple (I love my iPod Touch, though it's a 1st gen so Skype wouldn't work with it anyway) but I still have my PSP as another Skype-capable device, too.
If I use the Skype application to dial my AT&T cell phone number, does my iPhone detonate?
I assume this will be supported on the iPod Touch as well, and if so, will be full of win. I can have most of the functionality of the iPhone with VoIP without the expense monthly fee.
The complaints about "shortcomings" are misguided.
I only need Skype in wifi hot spots. Domestically, I use my cell phone minutes for phone calls. If I need to call internationally from my iPhone, I use Skype-To-Go, their relay service.
I only need VOIP when I'm out of the country. I'm not going to use iPhone data roaming because it is too expensive. But there are plenty of free wifi spots around the globe.
Fring has been so unreliable for me, an official Skype client has me very excited. When I'm in Cabo or Canada (or anywhere overseas) for a weekend, and I want to call home, this is where a Skype client is perfect! Find a wifi hot spot and dial away!
You've got to start somewhere. Telcos are not easy companies to change. But if Skype gets a small toehold, people will get used to their free phone calls on their mobiles. Soon, when the market penetration gets high enough, they'll start complaining about being tethered to one spot. Hopefully, that will forces the telcos to (slowly) change.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
the news: seem to work over 3G and EDGE as well as Wifi. iPod Touch included. Chat included. Looks pretty decent to me. Some photos here: http://www.engadget.com/photos/skype-for-iphone-goes-live-in-japan/1460639/
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I too would love to see Skype run on a Touch. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no audio input hardware (no Bluetooth support, no suitably wired plug).
So the geeky question is: what would be required to run Skype on an iPod Touch? I can see building a plug that would enable a Bluetooth headset for it. The final step then would be persuading Skype to support such a hack (er, 3rd-party product).
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
As for crappy VOIP, that's baloney. VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls.
That requires a minimum link speed and depends on what your carrier's QoS rules are (or if it's implemented).
If your VoIP packets get "best effort" service along with everything else you're sending/receiving (which is both typical with ISPs who didn't pay extra for QoS or configure it right and the fallout of the simple interpretation of "network neutrality"), you're hosed whenever things get congested.
Try running both a VoIP call and multiple big downloads on your home system simultaneously. Then tell us that "VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls".
Unless the low-bandwidth stream of VoIP packets takes priority over the file transfer packets you'll get jitter, latency, and packet loss (as the VoIP packets wait behind varying numbers of file packets and the transfers ramp up until they experience packet loss - which means the VoIP experiences it, too). That will translate, at a minimum, into delay, which breaks the handoff dynamics of conversation. It will probably also result in dropouts, reconstruction artifacts, "Max Headroom" style repeats, etc. depending on how the VoIP application handles packet delivery flakeyness.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think some of the Apple Hater froth around your mouth got into your eyes, as you seem to have missed the fact that the iPhone already has other VOIP clients - just not an official Skype client until now. AT&T doesn't care a whit, these all work over WiFi.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I too would love to see Skype run on a Touch. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no audio input hardware (no Bluetooth support, no suitably wired plug).
Any of the external dock based microphones will work on the Touch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you also can use remote desktop on your windows mobile device. works like a charm. i run firefox that way because the cpu in my desktop is way faster so the pages render faster.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
android has a CLI, sort of. Some older releases had a little problem where everything you typed was also interpreted by the command line. Oops.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No way of overriding it without quickpwn or some other jailbreaking tool.
After that you just install backgrounder and all is well.
We are doing a test rollout of blackberries, iphones, and windows mobile devices.
I get blackberries brought to me regularly because they are screwed up or the person does not know how to do what they want to do. I have not had a single iphone or windows mobile device brought to me.
I was studying a broad last year and got slapped with a restraining order. I narrowly avoided an indictment for stalking. Be careful, my friend.
More music, fewer hits
Apparently the v2.0 hardware _does_ have mic & bluetooth support (requires v3.0 software to activate the BT), but not the v1.0 hardware (what I have now).
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Presumably it would have background notifications with the next version of the OS - I just don't know if that would be 'real time' enough for receiving skype phone calls.
It's not that it can't be done, it's that it sucks battery life. Did you view the presentation from the iPhone 3.0 event? They ran tests on running background apps on multiple platforms and measured battery life, it it shortened it by 80%. Considering how much MORE iPhone users seem to use their phones this could be a major problem and why they chose not to enable background apps.
ok, first of all... I'm in the catagory of FINALLY!! Yes, I want sms. Yes, I want voicemail or other functionality but this is a mobile device AND its the first version.. MY biggest beef is that they couldn't get 3g working instead of just wifi?! wth? THAT seems kinda dumb to me, but its still going to replace nimbuzz and fring. They are already gone, as for multi-program, backgrounding.. I think it was idiotic for apple not to include even a limited running app version in fw v3 (maybee only allow 2-3 apps at a time) you all are still getting nearly free long distant/voip on an ipod/iphone... COMMON! wait til we see what happens
iCall has been available on the iPhone for about a half-year now. (apparently in beta)
It integrates seamlessly with the iPhone. Those skype guys are behind. :P
Yep, sad to say... your (stated) reasons fail.
Browsing, while slow as death using Minimo, works fine in a crisis. But make no mistake - browsing on any handheld will suck donkey balls, simply due to real estate.
Every other feature... I can manage every aspect of a 4 rack, 21 server farm with 94 workstations, along with a 20 slot Option21 PBX, from anywhere on my PPC. I have VNC, RDP, Putty, remote regedit, whatever. I even have reverse-RDP, so a desktop can "remote desktop" my PPC. I had my iPaq3900 acting as an AP to bridge an aircard connection back in... wait for it! 2002! Bluetooth PAN bridging, voice-rec, TTS, whatever... no one cared then, and they don't care now.
It's great that iPhone is getting some of these neat features in 2009. It's pathetic that people think they're new, or of merit. You know, 2001 called. They want their nearly decade-old feature-set back.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
iPhone OS 3.0 allegedly will have copy/paste.
Not that it shouldn't have been added in one of the first 16 public builds.
I see a time when phone companies accept that there is much value in the data as the phone service. Actually, I already see this happening with phone companies offering wi-fi hotspots. In the meantime phone companies are going to drag their feet to maximise revenue from the existing system.
As bandwidth costs go down, it may work out to be cheaper in cities to install wi-fi locations, than installing cell phone towers, but until there are proper meshes we are unlikley to see this really work for moving phones. I often wonder whether IPv6 could solve part of the problem here? I would see each cell phone with its own unique IP address hoping from hotspot to hotspot.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You could make phone calls via the iPod Touch with an external microphone or on the new ones via the built in headphone microphone. Fring can do this already but when I tried it the call quality and lag was terrible(over wifi).
iPhone uses the same virtual memory management that darwin uses (since it's based on a darwin kernel).
What you probably meant to say was that the iPhone application launcher (springboard) and API restricts running applications not blessed by Apple concurrently.
For example, iPod application, phone application, and many other Apple provided applications can run concurrently with other applications. This is also the case if you run any applications on a jailbroken iPhone/ipod touch with the application called "Background".
The reason for such restrictions might be due to the small amount of memory available for running processes and Apple's desire to provide a very stable phone.
Oh fuck me.
I totally didn't realize I was talking about *virtual* (swappable) memory.
I'll post a link, there's nothing illegal about it:
http://blog.iphone-dev.org/
For lack of a better signature...
Just playing devil's advocate: In that case, all laptop manufacturers should also only allow one task at a time. Think of the battery life you could get!
It would make sense for the iPhone default setting to be "No background apps" and allow the user to change the setting. But to purposely cripple their product -- and make the user jump through hoops to uncripple it -- isn't okay (to this user, anyway).
I'm not sure it's the background apps that are the problem so much as what 99% of background apps do while in the background. The main reason to run an application in the background is to do networking, and that means the radio has to move from GPRS mode into EDGE or 3G mode, which drains significantly more power. It's not at all surprising that it causes a much higher battery drain if background apps keep waking the cellular hardware while it should be idle.
As soon as you bring up the cellular network to get data, you're spending several seconds negotiating with the tower to switch from GPRS mode to EDGE or 3G and obtain an IP number for the interface. Then, your initial DNS lookup, at least based on my experience with AT&T's EDGE network can potentially add another 10-15 seconds in the worst case. Pull even a trivial amount of data and you've probably added another ten or fifteen seconds. At that point, you've spent the better part of a minute with the radio draining significantly more power than it does in its normal GPRS/waiting-for-calls standby state. Do this once a minute, and you almost might as well be talking on the phone to somebody. Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it does drain a lot more power....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Totally realistic, even for Mexico's 3G network, I should know, I have an Iphone
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Having read the iPhone Memory Management guide a number of times, I can assure you that that the iPhone's virtual memory model does not include disk swapping. The Apple documentation says exactly this.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Actually, virtual memory and swappable memory are not the same thing. Virtual memory just means that non-contiguous sections of physical memory are presented to applications by the OS as if they were contiguous. Disk swapping is made possible by virtual memory, but virtual memory does not have to include swap space.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I was going to argue this, but I really can't. I'd never get an iPhone because of the App Store restrictions, but what it does support it supports very well indeed.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
(the iPhone doesn't enable swapping, I believe). That is correct. The iPhone's virtual memory model does not include swapping.
That's correct. The iPhone doesn't enable swapping.
If you want a phone with full VoIP support, get an unlocked Nokia E71 for about $350; it works on AT&T's network. It has built-in support for VoIP (including Gizmo), WiFi, GPS, 3G, a full WebKit browser, a 3Mpixel camera, video recording, and lots of other features. I have that and an unlimited data plan, and I still don't bother using the VoIP feature; it's easier just to use regular cellular calls and not significantly more expensive. So, the notion that AT&T is preventing you from using VoIP on their network is a myth. Whatever restrictions there may be are specific to the iPhone.
This is like installing windows in a vm on a windows pc.
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Even better, it will only work on WIFI, and wifi is turned off while the screen is off.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
OMG. "Max Headroom" Over twenty years ago. Time to crank up the geez-o-meter.
Sonny, the first machine I programmed for money used vacuum tubes - for the DIODES, too.
But before that I programmed machines that used relays to perform computations for fun - and to print my QSL cards. Built some, too.
My first personally-owned email machine exchanged email directly with IHNP4 (in Napierville Illinois). From Michigan. At 300 baud. (Because I had hacked the filters in a 110-baud modem to speed it up.) Uphill through the snow both ways! I paid the long distance out-of-pocket, back when it cost by the minute in major bux.
I had a .com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the part was the UUCP machine name from earlier. It was (and still is) a "good" name, four letters long, in a global namespace including ALL the machines that exchanged mail via UUCP mailnet at the time I picke it. (It was my second choice. I missed the one I really wanted - also four letters - by a week - while my "upstream contact" was twiddling his thumbs rather than forwarding the application forms, in the days before the web. B-b )
I was ON the project that coined the term "hypertext".
Geez-o-meter? I can out-geezer nearly everybody here. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Make that:
I had a {domainname}.com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the {domainname} part was the UUCP machine name from earlier.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not if you're from Canada
iPhones can run multiple apps, but the public SDK does not allow developers to write apps that run in the background. Apple can certainly write apps that run in the background, though. The music service, for one. The phone service, etc. Additionally, developers for jailbroken phones can run applications in the background because they're not constrained by the official SDK.
Safari is another app that runs in the background. I've never really been sure why (unless it's to allow you to view the last page you were reading offline ...)
Lacking background capabilities isn't really an issue provided that applications save their state and that they launch rapidly (or in other words, the launcher software becomes a virtual task manager).
Even better, it will only work on WIFI, and wifi is turned off while the screen is off.
Not after jailbreaking ...
In theory, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the whole philosophy of the iPhone is that Apple knows better than the owner of the device (which is probably true in the case of a lot of the users...) so there is no way of overriding this.
Also better than a lot of developers (isn't there something like 25000 apps in the app store now?) who are brand new to mobile phone development and don't understand it's constraints (e.g. battery life)
Yeah -- it's only legal until you're sued by someone with a lot more money than you.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
So open a US iTunes store account and download the app for your Canadian iPhone.
That's what I did and just talked to my mom for 40 min (otherwise long distance call). The sound quality is way better than any of the other alternatives.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Yeah, and their example is also complete twaddle.
How about tracking your sports training with the GPS and listening to music at the same time. Opps, can't do that, but I can on my Nokia.
Bzzzzt, total FAIL.
Hell, I leave network accessing apps running in the background all time time on my old E70 (with a half dead battery) and I still don't get 80% decrease in battery.
Have you ever considered the reason is just that Apple can't figure out how to make an energy efficient OS?