Skype to come pre-loaded on i-mate Pocket PC Phones
By Peter Rojas 
posted Feb 10th 2005 9:45AM
posted Feb 10th 2005 9:45AM
Seems like
Skype is everywhere you want to be
lately, and their latest smooth move is to announce that i-mate will ship their new PDA2K and PDA2 Pocket PC Phones
pre-loaded with Skype's Voice over IP software so you can start making free calls right out of the box. Like that new
BlackBerry 7270, the idea is that you'll make your free
Skype calls from a WiFi hotspot (both phones come with built-in 802.11b), but there's really no reason why you couldn't
fully stick it to the man by installing Skype (or say
Vonage's softphone) on a 3G-capable Pocket PC Phone (like
Verizon's XV6600) and make
cheap/free VoIP calls from anywhere (anywhere you get EV-DO coverage, that is).
That's really awesome but... when is this going to happen on the Treo? I am sure Skype would work with GPRS alone, since it works on the PC when using the phone as a modem...
I have the Verizon XV6600 (marvellous phone)pictured in the post, I live in the Boston area and have EV-DO service which is awesome. I have installed Skype for pocket pc on it and messaging works great, but the voice calls suffered from major delays, the other person would talk, then I would hear them like 2-3 seconds later. Not great really. I'm sure it's going to get better too. When it does, I'm going to be a laughing fool....
EVDO + skype != goodness
quite frankly, its horrible. the latency on EVDO is way too high for VoIP. bandwidth may be king, but pingtime is the court jester
GPRS has huge ping times too, as my experience goes. But voice IM is interesting too, isn't it? There should be no such problem with IM.