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Hello again! Today we’re launching Beta 3 of Skype 4.0 for Windows.

We’ve spent the last few months analysing your feedback in detail, and I’d like to thank all of you who have contacted us directly as well as the hundreds of discussions on blogs and Twitter, all of which have helped us shape this third Beta version.

So what’s new?

Firstly we’ve included full History features, as promised when we launched Beta 2. You can browse and search past conversations by event type (instant messages, incoming calls, outgoing calls, and so on), making it easy to retrieve information about who was involved and what was said. You’ll find the History button at the bottom of the Conversation tab.

But that’s not all. We’ve added a few new ingredients to the mix to make using Skype just that little bit smoother:

We’ve made numerous improvements to call and video quality with a new Bandwidth Manager. You’ll notice that Skype will adapt a lot faster to varying changes in your network condition now.

You’ll notice a new look that’s more reflective of our brand which we’ve achieved by customising the Windows chrome. You can turn this off from Options if you don’t like it.

We’ve also introduced Abuse Reporting when you block a user. This will help us address unwanted authorisation requests which a small number of our users are experiencing.

Additionally, we’ve improved the readability of instant messages and the usability of the Call Toolbar. Outlook Contacts are back and we’ve also made some adjustments to the way Group Conversations are viewed.

So, yup, we’ve been pretty busy – all thanks to the feedback you’ve been given us. This has been a fantastic experience for us really engaging our community and building a product with all of you.

What next?

Please download it and try it out. Your feedback is still important to us as our Windows team continue to work on priming 4.0 Beta for the next release. Stay tuned