Skype Enables Video For iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch

Catching up to the competition such as Fring, Skype users on the iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch fourth generation, or with iOS 4.0 or higher, can now make and receive free Skype video calls over a WiFi or 3G connection.

What this means is that colleagues can more easily discuss work details, grandparents can coo in real-time at grandbabies and – as Skype shows off in a video on its blog, offering truly little additional incentive, in one person’s opinion – flubby men with morning breath can dance in their skivvies for friends.

Video calls

With the new app, users can also make video calls to friends on their computers, place free audio calls to anyone also on Skype and call landlines and mobile phones around the world at discounted rates. Video calls can be received by owners of the iPod touch 3rd generation and iPad, and calls can be made between devices with the new app and desktops running Skype for Windows 4.2 or up, Skype for Mac 2.8 or up or Skype for Linux with the ASUS videophone.

On Christmas Eve, Engadget delivered the news that the new app was arriving, after discovering, on the Skype site, a help document for the app, which was soon afterward removed.

Though Skype has been slow to get its act together in enabling video calling on the iPhone, the capability is exploding, as the Pew Research Center recently reported – of some 3,000 American adults recently surveyed, nearly 20 percent have already participated in a video call from their computer or phone. (Among 18 to 29-year-old web users, that figure climbed to 29 percent.)

At the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Skype General Manager Jonathan Christensen should have a lot more to say on how ubiquitous the technology is likely to become. Christensen is slated to participate in a panel called “Video Calling Gets Ready for Prime Time,” which will pose the question, per the CES brochure, “Has the time finally come for videoconferencing to go mainstream?”

On 9 December, Fring celebrated its one-year anniversary of enabling mobile video calling – which it has enabled more than 100 minutes minutes of in that time (not to mention 1.5 billion mobile voice calling minutes). It used the opportunity to introduce a new capability, dynamic video quality (DVQ), which adjusts video bit rate and frame rate according to a user’s device and bandwidth during the call, for optimal video quality.

“In the year since pioneering mobile video calls, we’ve seen that user’s network conditions change dramatically during and between video calls. That’s the nature of mobile experiences in heterogeneous networks,” Alex Nerst, co-founder and CTO of Fring, said in a statement. “DVQ lets users make the best use of the peer-to-peer network capacity available at any moment during a video call, regardless of if they’re stepping into an elevator, commuting on a train or simply walking away from their WiFi hub.”