Skype 3.2 beta for Windows — Send Money with PayPal, video snapshot, other improvements
Skype 3.2 beta for Windows is available from today. If you’re adventurous and an experienced Skype user, [download now.](http://www.skype.com/go/windows-beta)
Here are the most significant changes in this version.
### Send Money with PayPal
You may have heard Niklas talking about this just last week at the VON conference down in San Jose. We have also referred to this feature previously. And now it’s finally out as part of this beta.
It’s very easy to use. Both the sender and receiver just need to have a PayPal account. The receiver may also create the account later after you have already sent the money.
This feature is subject to PayPal limitations — you need to be in countries where Paypal supports respectively sending or receiving money. If you use it to send money to someone who cannot receive it, the funds are returned to your account or credit card, so it’s fine and no money is lost.
See our [user guide](http://www.skype.com/help/guides/sendmoney/) for more information about how exactly to use this feature.
You may also say that Skype is now your **PayPal contact list**. PayPal itself didn’t have a contact list feature. And now all your PayPal send/receive transactions can happen right within Skype.
]]>### Video snapshot
Do you have a webcam and you thought it would be great to shoot your profile picture with it? So that even if you didn’t use video, people could still see you. Previously, you needed to use some other program for this and shoot the picture and move files around and resize and crop and save in different formats and do all these many little things until you finally got your picture to Skype.
So we thought… why not have this capability right within Skype itself? Now you can take your picture with your webcam and use it as My Picture in Skype, saving all this trouble. Just click “Personalise”, “Change your Picture” and “Take video snapshot”. After you shoot the picture, you can resize it and select a part of it that you wish to use. See the [user guide](http://www.skype.com/help/guides/videosnapshot/) for more info and instructions.
### Easier account access
If you use our paid products, you may have some Skype Credit, Skype Voicemail and one or more SkypeIn numbers. You may have made several purchases and called various numbers with SkypeOut. From time to time, you may want to review your history or even buy new things. You previously needed to go to [Your Account](http://www.skype.com/go/myaccount) on the web to do all this. While you can still do it this way, there’s an easier method now available. Just click the “View Account” button in Skype and see all the essential information right in Skype. You can then do more transactions right within Skype, or when necessary, we will automatically take you to the relevant part of our website or shop.
### Import contacts from more sources
Not everyone is on Skype yet — but you can help them get to it. We had Import Contacts previously available, but it could only import from Outlook and Outlook Express before. In this version, we have added support for importing from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. You will need to enter your account info for importing the contacts.
Importing contacts may help you find out that your friends are already on Skype, just not in your contacts yet. When the importer has downloaded your contacts from the various sites, it does an intelligent search on the Skype network to see if these people are already on Skype. They often are, and so you don’t need to pursue them to download Skype or anything — you can just add them to your contacts right away. But if they are not on Skype yet, you can send them an e-mail to invite them to Skype straight from Import contacts wizard.
If you’re an experienced user and want to try out Skype 3.2 beta now, [download it here](http://www.skype.com/go/windows-beta). See also [detailed change log](https://developer.skype.com/WindowsSkype/ReleaseNotes) and [this page](https://developer.skype.com/WindowsSkype) for information about how to report bugs and give us feedback.
The upgrades look impressive and there is no doubt about the fact that Skype is maturing in leaps and bounds, but there is still one very basic feature that is being ignored. Users SHOULD NOT be able to sing into Skype from multiple locations at the same time. If I have forgotten to sign out on my office comp and I log in from home, I am actually signed in at both places and the messages are shown on both screens!! This is something which you guys really need to look into.
The addition of more address book imports is welcome (especially gmail). When are you going to help out those of us with the Thunderbird email client?
As for the comment by aniruddhamallik I don’t agree, but do think this should be an option you should be able set in the client. I think it should fail safe to allow multiple log-ins but have the option to logout other instances if you so chose that option.
The new additions are great, but there’s still core functionality that needs to be rock solid. Too many calls are ended prematurely, too many calls have no video, too many transfers are staggered. I love my Skype – been a user since 0.87 – but some things haven’t improved since then. PS. I like the option to be able to be signed in from more than one place. I also like te option to sing from more than one place…
Some first impressions on this beta:
The font on the Skype Find-tab now seems to be of a different size than otherwise in the application. A fixed font size perhaps?
The view-menu now is in a weird position – standard is to have it among the leftmost menus…
A bit premature that. Restarting the app sorted out the font size on the Skype Find-tab… However, the menu placement is not an improvement. Sound quality is perhaps a bit better now.
And what’s about Linux???? More and more features are added to Skype and on Linux I can only use 1.3.x with stoneage features.
I like Skype but I don’ like how the Linux community is treated. No updates, no features, just use it as is.
One feature I am really missing is the possibility to add more then one phone number to an external contact (SkypeOut). Right now I need to create at least 2 contacts for each person because they all have a land phone number and a mobile phone number. This makes my contact list grow in size very fast and imho this is unnecessary.
@aniruddhamallik: Yeah guess what, the messages don’t show on both screens.
@thwint: I agree, how about giving these updates to us LINUX users too! :/
I’ve been a big Skype promoter up today (as you can see from my skype point) but today… 46 MB of memory used by Skype, plus 22 MB used by the SkypePM process. Why the hell should I use 68 MB for an IM/Phone software?
I really think you guys should slim down “this thing called Skype”, emprove some chat features that are still poor (such as one color for each multichat participant, or a mini skype picture near each message group), or I will convert my workmates to gTalk, even after converting most of them from MSN messenger to Skype.
Another issue with this version, that I think also was in 3.1, is that after clicking away events, the flag remains on the taskbar icon for Skype.
I am a person who is all for the flash, I like the toys, but not at the expense of what the program is actually intended to do. Before we start adding all these great features how about:
1 GET CALLER ID WORKING!!!
2 Improve call clarity
3 Lets have a Skype Lite that can run on regular computers. You could just have the phone functionality and nothing else!!
I love your program, but when you look at programs like gizmo http://www.gizmoproject.com/ they just seem to run better. Also, I would LOVE to see a web client for making phone calls!! Something like this https://www.gizmocall.com/.
Thanks for your time, and keep up the good work.
I often receive calls from home (home is USA, I live in China) through skypein, forwarded to my local cell phone. But no matter who’s calling, the caller ID doesnt seem to work. It would be nice to know who’s calling so i could choose to answer or not…
I should add though, that if i dont answer a call forwarded from skype, or if i reject the call, it still does a good job at transfering the call back to skype, and thus activating my voicemail. That is a plus.
I think we need to be able to run two different sign-in accounts AT THE SAME TIME!!! One for personal chat and the other for company support usage. With an “ON HOLD” button to mute one connection to take the other call. That would be nice.
Other than that .. skype rocks my world!
i would like to see :
1) only one machine login
2) ability to send the chat to an email account automatically [like the gmail talk feature]
3) ability to export the call history to an organized file, let’s say PDF.
4) faster sharing or sending files [ this problem is almost with all messengers i dealt with].
5) integration with other messengers such as calling, chatting and etc….
6) call recording.
7) option to logout automatically after a certain idle time.
maybe some kind of extensions like weather, news [same way with firefox].
9) time difference, if i have abroad contacts.
10) web version that does not need any installation.
I just got the Robotics Cordless Skype Dual Phone. Great product, but having a problem with using the computer and phone at the same time (as in being on the same call) does anyone know how that works or if possible? I heard Robotics gives support for for Skype but their only open Mon.- Fri. for response. If anyone can shed light on this, I would be glad to tell you how you can save $50 on the phone.
Thanks
With new (beta 3.2.0.82) version I have two Skype icons on my Desktop. For one I can change icon properties and for second one I can not (this icon doesn’t have Skype icon and it can not be assigned?!.
If you put one icon in upper left corner and second one in upper right corner on your Desktop and if you run Skype with this no logo icon Skype program is started (both icons gets Skype icon in that moment) but then when Skype is connected two icons of Skype are switching places on your Desktop??? You can check this since now for opposite icons you can/cannot change properties of icon!?
If you run other icon this doesn’t happen?
This is not very important but it has strange behavior .
For business users – one extremely important and still missing feature is a list of calls made by users simply with date, time, duration and cost – this would be what bosses need to be in control of their skype expendtiure in the company. If you think seriously about business clients think about this feature.
Hey, what is going on with Skype for Linux? Can we try beta or something? or this 1.3.0.53 version is last version and no more see new version for linux in last 50 years? Or we Linux users are
suckers? I can’t understand. This legendary 1.3.0.53 version is released in 29 october, 6 months later Skype for Windows is 100 thimes more cool then Linux skype, and for this time windows skype was 3.0 version, 3.1, now 3.2 beta hah funny, is this a Linux comunity or Operating System descrimination?
I would love to see screen sharing as a future feature in Skype. One user would be able to share his/her screen with another user. This would be a great feature for business users and would be a great feature to help people with technical questions about the use of their software programs.
“Skype Send Money is currently not available to PayPal users in Taiwan.”
….I Hope it will be available soon.
I am a longtime user of skype and have been very disappointed with the last 2 versions (3.1, 3.2).
It adds a lot of bloat and no really useful functionality.
More importantly, the basic functions are not working as well as in earlier versions. For example, on one of my computers, the incoming video no longer works after upgrading to 3.1. I tried 3.2 and that didn’t work either. All other software runs fine on that computer, and i also updated the video driver, windows, as well as the directx9 drivers to the latest versions. The camera on it is a logitech notebook pro, which has worked very well in the past. Regular voicechat is also unreliable, with the machine freezing up once in awhile under versions 3.1 and 3.2.
I ended up having to download skype 3.0 from http://oldversion.com and the video works fine again & the machine became stable again.
I want to share this experience so that other readers will carefully consider before upgrading from what is a stable and functional version (3.0 or below) into what is still an unstable platform (3.1, 3.2)
I’m having the same problem as kwanghui. Freezing up sometimes since 3.1…
features like sending money through paypal dont do much for me, since i can already do that from the paypal website. also, how often do i really want to send money? this seems to cater to the strippers that use your servie. im interested in videoconferencing. your one-on-one video is absolutely superior to everything else, and the acoustic echo cancellation is amazing. now we just need the ability to have multi-party video calls. if you need more programmers, send me an email! this project is awesome!
Install Skype for Windows