I found in my testing (and regularly find in my frequent personal usage) that Skype's voice quality is actually superior to what I've often gotten on a mobile call. I made test calls in the app from New York to the West Coast and to Japan. The last is a separate app that lets you use your Skype Credit to pay by the minute for access via millions of public hotspots, such as those Boingo hotspots you find at airports.Ĭall and Video Quality I can sum up call quality in Skype pretty quickly: It's been in the lead for years, and just seems to keep getting better. Nor do you see the status of voice messages, call forwarding, or Skype Wi-Fi. For example, there are no longer entries for your Skype Number (the number that people can use to call you from standard phones). The design of the Profile page is more pleasing and cleaner than in the older version, but it doesn't include a couple of helpful entries that were formerly present. Sitting steadily at the bottom of all these screens are two buttons-one for the dial pad and one for chat. If you need to find someone from your list of contacts, People is the place, and Favorites offers large tiles for easy access to the most important people in your world. Now they slide back and forth smoothly and naturally. Navigation between each section is more elegant than in the previous version, which snapped from view to view with no visual transition. I usually leave the app on the Recent view, since that's where I can keep up with ongoing interactions. Instead, you swipe through three main views to start communicating-People, Recent, and Favorites-or check out your own profile page from its icon at top right. Interface As with the previous Skype iPhone app, there's no true home page. Unlimited calling plans start at $2.99 a month and pay-as-you go is 2.3 cents a minute for the U.S, but SMS messages are actually a bit pricey at 11.2 cents each. You don't need to enter credit card info to sign up, but if you do, you can avail yourself of things like cheap calls to regular phones (either using pay-as-you-go Skype Credit or a subscription), SMS messaging, and low-cost access to public Wi-Fi hotspots. Getting Started with Skype for iPhone To create a Skype account, you can either fill out a form requiring name, email, country, and language, or you can just use your Facebook or Microsoft Account credentials (such as an account). The newly redesigned Skype app for iPhone supports most (though not all) of the service's capabilities in a highly usable, intuitive design. You can even get an incoming phone number through Skype that works with standard mobiles and landlines. Maybe that explains why the service recently passed two billion talk minutes a day among its 300-million-plus users.
Skype is also available for any platform you can think of: Android, Blackberry, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, and many smart TVs.
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