Skype Garage

Skype 2.6 for Android - with file sending, improved graphics and better video on Nvidia Tegra2

We have just released a Skype 2.6 for Android.

With the Skype 2.6 for Android we have introduced a number of improvements to the application, like file sending, improved graphics, better video quality on Nvidia Tegra2 devices. In addition we have enabled few additional devices for video calling. Newly added devices are HTC Amaze 4G and Motorola DROID RAZR. You can enable video calling on any device from the options, but we can't guarantee the video calls quality on them as we have not performed extensive testing on all android devices.

Get the updated application now from Android Market and let us know what you think about it on our Support Network.

In short the new features are:

• Send pictures, videos and files
• Easier to sign out, plus auto-sign in
• Improved look and feel with new graphics
• Receiving, as well as sending, voice message
• Better video quality on Tegra 2 devices

Let's take a bit longer view on the new features:

Send pictures, videos and files

Now you can send and receive files from your Skype for Android to other Skype. It's a great way to share the moments to others just after they have happened.

Easier to sign out, plus auto-sign in

You will notice on this version of Skype for Android that not where is a automatically sign in possibility and more easy to sign out in case you would like to do so.

Improved look and feel with new graphics

We have overhauled the graphics for the Skype for Android app. The new graphics are streamlined and tuned to be bit easier to be used.

Receiving, as well as sending, voicemail

Now you can send and receive voicemail easily also on the Skype for Android and never miss a call. Skype voicemail is free for everyone, you just need to activate it.

Better video quality on Tegra 2 devices

We have worked together with Nvidia to provide all our users who have Nvidia Tegra2 chipset powered devices to be be able to enjoy higher resolution and better quality video calling experience.

Skype 2.6 for Android, with full version number 2.6.501.77 on Android Market and 2.6.500.76 on GetJar.

Skype 2.6 for Android has a few known issues, please be aware of them when using it:

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Devices affected	Description	Current solution
All	Fails to access Skype web site for "Buy credit" and "Buy Online number"	Make sure that time and date on device is current.
All	On some occasions the chat messages may appear in wrong order	None available.
All	Call drops when 2G/3G changes back to wifi: In case user has enabled Wi-Fi and 2G/3G connection and receives Skype call while on 2G/3G connection, call drops if device changes connection back to Wi-Fi	None available
All	Call quality depends on the signal strength of Wi-Fi connection and the bandwidth of 3G connection	In case call quality is not optimal, make sure you have good network connection
All	Video calling to the iPad 1 that is using the Skype for iPhone app is currently not working; the call automatically gets downgraded to an audio call.	Use the Skype for iPad version application
All	During an ongoing call, it is not possible to change in call volume while proximity sensor is activated.	Move phone away from head to deactivate proximity sensor, then change the call volume.
All	With very large accounts (600+ contacts) the performance of the application will not be optimal.	None available.
All	You can only enable video if the device has a camera and it has ARM-v7 CPU.	None available.
All	Privacy settings not synced from cloud.	Being signed only into one device at a time will avoid the problem, but no solution available at the moment for this issue.
All	When a video call is put on hold, the Picture-in-Picture (Pip) does not disappear. On some deices it becomes full screen, and on other devices it appears in the upper left corner.	None available.
All	Sharing very large files (over 1 GB in size) may stall the device.	None available.
All	Making a video call to a non-video capable device (such as a thin-client) results in video call with a black screen. There is a toast message displayed.	Turn off the camera to revert to an audio call.
Devices running Cyanogen mod of Android	Skype is unstable and randomly stops working, especially on sign in.	Revert to a market version of Android.
Froyo (Android 2.2) devices	When answering a video call in portrait orientation, the Picture-In-picture (PiP) appears as a landscape view.	Answer a video call in landscape orientation.
HTC Desire - 2.2	Heavy audio quality degradations.	None available.
HTC Desire HD 2.2	Video stream shows noise after a min of streaming	Upgrade to 2.3
HTC Jetsteam	No outgoing video.	None available.
HTC Sensation	Changing camera (front/back) multiple may crash Skype.	None available.
Motorola Milestone 2.0; Motorola Milestona 2.1 Motorola Milestonia XT720 2.1	In case user receives incoming GSM call during Skype call, it may happen that audio is not sent/received during GSM call.	None available
Plantronics 510 Bluetooth headset	Audio does not go through headset.	Use a different Bluetooth headset.
Samsung Galaxy S - 2.2	Volume set at maximum during call	Upgrade to 2.3
Samsung Galaxy S + Transform & Intercept product family 2.1	Skype for Android is not able to login on the following devices with Android 2.1 and below: Samsung Galaxy S GT-I9000 Samsung Galaxy S Mesmerize Samsung Galaxy S Epic 4G Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant Samsung Galaxy S Captivate Samsung Galaxy S Fascinate Samsung Transform Samsung Intercept	Upgrade to Android OS version 2.2
Samsung Galaxy Spica I5700 2.1; HTC Legend	Connection is not seamless for these devices. When user has enabled both WiFi and 2G/3G connection, after a while, device switches to 2G/3G, but for other contacts, user appears to be offline as there really is no connection in the device	None available
Samsung Galaxy Spica I5700 2.1; LG Aloha 2.1, HTX Wildfire; HTC Legend	These phone models fulfill the criteria to be compatible with Skype 2.0. for Android. The application performance may not be optimal.	None available
Samsung Galaxy Tab - 2.2	No video on the Samsung Galaxy Tab by default, since the back camera doesn't work properly.	Upgrade to 2.3. The user can enable the video in Settings.
Sony Ericsson Xperia mini	Skype dies on first run.	None available.
Varied	On some devices, radio music is not stopped automatically when Skype call comes in. Call can be received, but when answering the call, radio music is still played together with call audio.	User has to stop radio manually
Varied	Outgoing camera rotated 90 or 180 degrees.	Some devices have a "Rotate Camera" option in the camera menu, othervice none available.
Vizio VTAB1008	Video rotated 90 degrees.	None available.

The Ten Deadly Sins of Mobile Video Calling - Sins 9 and 10: Society

This is the third of three posts in my mini-series about mobile video calling. If you're new, you might like to take a look at the first two posts (here and here) before diving in to this one.

Having already discussed some of the technical and experiential barriers to good mobile video experiences, in this post I cover two societal problems which barriers standing in the way of an optimal mobile video experience.

Sin 9: Limited use cases

To be frank, sometimes you really don't want mobile video.

• When you're driving. This probably goes without saying. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if people try it anyway, holding the phone to the steering wheel. Same set of folks who nimbly text and send emails while moving at 60 mph on the 101. (For those of you who aren't familiar, it's a congested stretch of freeway that runs the length of Silicon Valley, bemoaned by everyone who's ever driven on it.)

• When you don't exactly look your best. Just out of the shower, or when you're in your jammies. You just don't want video in these cases.

• When you're somewhere you don't want the other person to see. Classic example - the bathroom. Or around 3:10 pm, when my kids come home from school. Even though the door to my office is shut, my children decide there is something fantastically important that they have to share with me right at that moment. They knock on the door - I don't answer. They take this as permission to open the door, and they peek in. They see me talking, but being used to seeing me mute myself on voice calls to talk to them, they proceed to wave their hands to get my attention. Then they start to whisper, 'dad', 'DAD!' At that point, I have to apologize to a room full of sales people, get up from my chair, and shoo my children out of the room. Embarrassing.

• When you don't want the other side to see you. B2C conversations - that call to the pizza place, or the call to the insurance agent. Maybe you just have no interest in that person seeing you. It's a privacy issue of sorts. When communication is highly impersonal, an impersonal modality like voice works naturally. Video is much more personal.

Some of this is social norm and may evolve over time. I will say - at Skype, we use video constantly and it is the de facto mode of operation for business calls. I've had calls with people that were in their jammies in the morning, or sitting in a messy office. We get used to it.

Some of this is also not specific to mobile video, but rather a problem for video as a whole. However, these problematic use cases are amplified by video, where - more often than in desktop video - they will arise.

Sin 10: Having no-one to call

Products like Facetime support iOS to iOS calling. Others, like Tango, do mobile to mobile calling. The companies behind these products promote those use cases as the key things enabled by their products. The reality is - no one wants that.

I don't want to call an iPhone, or a PC, or a DROID, or a WiFi-enabled smartphone. I want to call my wife. Or my son. Or my grandma, or my best friend.

Video calling is all about connecting people, and not just any people - it's about connecting people to those they really want to see. And furthermore, it's about making those connections at the right opportunities - those spontaneous moments where the caller wants or needs to see the other person because now is the right time, or the only time.

This may sound obvious, but making this happen is by far the biggest problem with mobile video calling.

In reality, mobile video calling is frequently about barriers - barriers that get in the way of connecting me to the person I want to see, right now. There are four barriers, and all of them get in the way.

The first barrier is the device. Many video solutions require that the other participant have a device of a certain type, or from a certain manufacturer. Indeed, most of the mobile video solutions on the market today require that the other side of the call have a video-enabled mobile phone.

Going back to my original point - it's not about devices, it's about people. You might want to call someone who happens to be on a mobile phone that has video. Or, they may be sitting in front of their computer - then the PC is the right tool. Or, they may be on the road with their laptop. They might be sitting in the living room, in front of their TV.

To make calling work, we need to be able to connect that call to whatever device is available and most convenient for the person you're trying to call. After all, it's you who is asking for the call - you're intruding, if you like, into the time and space of the person you're calling. If that video call is to happen - and happen now - it must work with whatever device the person you're trying to call happens to have.

The technical challenges we have to overcome to break this boundary are formidable. Think about it - video needs to be available on platforms as diverse as PCs, Macs, from high-end gaming rigs to low-end netbooks. On TVs from a slew of manufacturers, each of which runs proprietary operating systems on occasionally arcane processors. On mobile phones with several very different operating systems.

Indeed, even just thinking about mobile, Android as an operating system is not just one platform as far as mobile video is concerned; Android runs on an enormous range of hardware, from entry-level barely-smartphones with CPUs that are single core and running at 200Mhz, up to dual-core 1+ GHz monsters. Some have DSPs, some don't. Some have great cameras, some have poor ones. They all have different screen sizes, with different resolutions. For mobile video to work, it needs to work on all of these. We refer to this problem as the 'smartphone zoo'.

The second barrier is the network technology. Some video solutions on the market work only over WiFi, or only over LTE. This is bad enough when you have to keep your network in mind before making a call. But, factor in that the person you want to call must be on a specific network too, and once again we dramatically reduce the likelihood that you'll be able to make a call.

Think about this from a voice perspective. When you dial a number from your mobile phone, do you care whether your mobile is on WiFi or GSM or CDMA? Do you need to think about whether the person you're calling is logged into WiFi? Of course not. You make the call, and it works. That's it. For mobile video to succeed, it must work on any network.

The third barrier is the service provider. Some mobile video solutions - especially earlier ones deployed by mobile operators - work only between users of the same service provider. Oftentimes, video calls are most valuable when they are with someone far away - that quick call to check up on my mom in North Carolina, or to see how my buddy Bill is doing on his European trip. Almost by definition, the caller and person they're calling will not have the same service providers in any of these situations.

Even for video calls between users in the same geographic region, where there is a possibility of the users having the same provider - they often won't. Frankly, I have no idea what service provider most of my friends use. Think about the five people you call the most on your mobile phone. Do know what mobile operator each of them is on? Human relationships do not obey the rules of geography and certainly not the rules of carrier allegiance. For mobile video to succeed, it must be possible for a user to call someone else without even needing to think about who their operator is.

The fourth barrier - and the most important one - is service availability. If I want to have a video call with my mom, my mom needs to be reachable on a video calling service. Breaking this barrier is partly about growing user base, but what really matters is that the ten people I want to reach are available. To be successful, a mobile video solution needs to be a mirror of the close-connection social graph for the person using it. If those close connections - those ten people that really matter to me - are available on the service, then the service brings great value to me.

So there you have it. The ten deadly sins of mobile video - challenges in technology, experience and society, each of which hamper the adoption of mobile video. Certainly all of them do not need to be solved for mobile video to take off - that's already happening. But they'll certainly play a part in determining how the next few years of mobile video calling take shape.

The Ten Deadly Sins of Mobile Video Calling - Sins 6-8: Experience

This is the second of three posts in my mini-series about mobile video calling. If you're new, you might like to take a look at the first post before diving in here.

Having already discussed some of the technical barriers to good mobile video experiences, in this post I cover some of the more fundamental experiential problems that can turn a great call into a terrible one.

Sin 6: Lighting

Good video requires good lighting. Bad lighting means a bad call - and it's really that simple.

Lighting is actually a problem for all video - not just mobile video. Very high end video conferencing systems will often include specifications for what colors the walls need to be in the room, and exactly what kind of lighting is needed and where in the room it needs to be placed. Sound extreme? Think about how movies are filmed and how important lighting is there.

Now think about Skype on your desktop or TV. If you're sitting in front of your computer in your home or office, there is typically some form of lighting that stays reasonably consistent throughout the call. Perhaps the lights are on in the room; or the sun is out and you are getting light through the windows. Nevertheless, you might end up being backlit, especially in rooms lit with direct sunlight. This has a negative effect on video calling.

Now, consider the case on a mobile device. Lighting is much more variable. You might be outside - it might be dark or dusk or in a place where no lighting is available. Or, it may be midday outside, with the sun overhead. Or, you might be backlit by the rising sun. In fact, the situation might change during a call.

If you're outside on your mobile phone, and you're backlit by the sun, and then you turn around - you're now front-lit. In other words, mobile video complicates lighting even further by introducing two new variables - one is movement, which can cause significant variation in lighting. The other is uncontrolled lighting, where you may be in situations where you can't turn lights on or off.

Some of this can be solved by lighting adjustments, often provided by the camera itself. But sometimes, lighting is just bad. And there's not much you can do about it.

Sin 7: Centering and shaking

In a mobile video call, for the other people to see you, you need to hold the phone at exactly the right distance from your face, and then hold it at exactly the right angle to capture you properly. Of course, the same problem exists in desktop or TV video calling. However, on the desktop - the PC or laptop is in a fixed position, usually on a desk, as is the camera. You're usually in a sitting position in a chair - or on a sofa in the case of TV.

On desktops, the camera can be adjusted so that it always captures your face as long as you're sitting in the chair at the normal distance from the camera. On a laptop, where the camera is embedded in the bezel of the display, the angle of the display can be adjusted to similar effect. In other words, the proper angle and distance of the camera to your face is maintained by a physical apparatus.

This is absolutely not the case for mobile video. In a mobile video call, you have to hold the mobile phone in your hand, and keep it at the correct distance. Maintaining this distance is not handled by a physical apparatus - it's maintained by your arm. This makes it difficult to do correctly, and requires continuous adjustment. Indeed, many mobile video calling applications give you a full-screen self-view while the call is ringing. This gives you a chance to 'prepare' and place the handset at the proper distance before the call. Nonetheless, people naturally move their arms and head during a call, and as a consequence, their face will often fall out of center, giving a poor experience for the person on the other side of the call.

Indeed, the relatively small self-view, which is not the focus of the your attention during a call, is the only bit of feedback that you're getting something wrong, and without clear feedback, you often don't realizes that all the other person can see is the top of your head, or your ear.

Motion complicates things even further. In a typical laptop or desktop video call, you don't move very much during a call. However, in a mobile video call, you're much more often in motion. Indeed, people often tend to pace or move around while on mobile calls, so that moving around is the norm and not the exception. Motion will naturally cause the distance between the phone and the caller's face to change during the call, aggravating the problem.

Like lighting, this is an experience problem that is primarily not technical.

Sin 8: Discomfort

This problem is very much related to the video shaking and centering problem, but is slightly different.

It gets pretty uncomfortable holding a phone at a fixed distance from your face for an extended period of time. Give it a try - take your mobile phone, hold it out from your face, and keep it there for a minute; five minutes; ten minutes; thirty minutes - and figure out how long you can hold it in place before you just can't stand it anymore.

This discomfort issue can be addressed with things like mobile kickstands, but it means that mobile video calling is not going to be the thing you use to have a one hour long call with grandma. You're still going to want to use the PC or TV for that.

However, mobile video lets you do things that you simply can't do on the PC or TV. An obvious example is 'see-what-I-see', which is typically a shorter call, whose purpose is to show something to the other person. My favorite use case for this is when you go to the grocery store to buy a box of pasta for your wife, only to discover that there are a million different brands of that pasta on the shelves. With see-what-I-see, you can show her the options and discuss them in real time. This is much more useful than trying to describe what each box looks like in order to find the one she wants.

Technology can't solve these problems in quite the same way as the first five, so we'll have to look elsewhere for solutions. In my final post, I'll discuss two societal problems that probably have the most fundamental effect on the way people make mobile video calls.

The Ten Deadly Sins of Mobile Video Calling - Sins 1-5: Technology

Since the dawn of humanity, mankind has always sought to communicate. Back in the beginning, things were simple. Grunts, pointing of fingers, clubbing on the head. Primitive, but it got the message across.

Mankind quickly discovered that it needed a way to communicate when the other person isn't right next to you. And so began a long series of inventions over centuries of time. Cave drawings, the written word, paper, the postal system and finally the arrival of electronic communications: The telegraph, the telephone. The telephone network was virtually transformed from the inside out when it went digital in the middle of the 20th century.

The next big revolution, of course, was mobile calling and the arrival of cellular networks. Ultimately it still provided the same old service as the wired telephone network did, but you could take it with you. With the Internet, a whole host of new communications services emerged - most notably email and IM. Ultimately though, these were just different manifestations of an old idea - sending text from one person to another. The telegraph had that too, decades prior. It just wasn't quite as easy to use. The Internet also brought the arrival of Voice over IP. In many ways, Voice over IP has been hugely successful. But when we look at it closely, it is also - to a large degree - another repackaging of what we have already been doing - voice, communicated over a distance. It got cheaper, and it got easier to use. But, was it really more - was it really better?

Not really. And that's what's startling here. When we look at communications, especially in modern times, what we find is that there have been huge advances in the things that surround real-time communications, but not the communications itself. Look at the mobile phone. This is a technology whose change over the last 20 years - even the last decade - is nothing short of phenomenal. Compare the original Motorola brick phone to the iPhone 4 - astounding. But as a phone - as a service for communications - you get almost the same experience. 20 years ago, we dialed numbers and we got tinny voice conversations. Today I get the same experience.

One of the things Skype is doing is trying to make this calling experience better.

With the SILK codec, we've introduced super-wideband voice calling to mobile devices around the world, enabling crisper conversations, easier interpretation of accents and an overall high quality voice experience. But voice is just the first step. To more fundamentally transform the communications experience, we needed to add video. And so we did.

The idea of video calling is certainly not new. The first videophone was shown at the World's Fair in 1964 - ages ago. The technology wasn't there yet, and it is only in recent years that video communications has gone mainstream. How mainstream? Well - let me share some of our statistics.

On average, 42% of Skype-to-Skype calls include video* and the number is probably even higher at peak times - around New Year celebrations, for example. And, Skype-to-Skype calling minutes are equivalent to approximately 20% of all global international PSTN and Skype-to-Skype calling minutes.**

Where video is going next is mobile. 2010 was undoubtedly the year that video calling arrived on mobile. Mobile video calling is also not new - we've seen a long line of failed mobile video products over many years. But we're still at the beginning of mobile video. Getting mobile video right is actually really hard. Indeed, there are - in essence - ten deadly sins of mobile video, each of which, if not adequately addressed, can stop the technology dead in its tracks.

They fall into three categories, which I'll explore in this blog post and two more later this week.

The first bunch of them are related to technology.

Sin 1: No cameras

Simple, but a big deal. Without a camera in the front of the phone, you are simply not going to have a video conference call. You might have a see-what-I-see experience using the rear camera - and Qik is great for this - but you really want both. Though phones with front facing cameras have been available outside of the US, they were never mainstream and never made their way stateside. That changed (finally) last year with the iPhone4 and iPod touch, which brought front facing cameras mainstream. Android phones have caught on now too, and we're seeing a bunch of them roll out now with front facing cameras. Great - and fortunately for us, advancements in technology are squashing this sin.

Sin 2: Lousy screens

Video needs screen real estate. Until recently, we just didn't have it. Prior to the arrival of devices like the iPhone and the Motorola DROID, screens were generally small and had meager resolutions too. Now, we finally have what we need - screens which are the size of the phone with resolutions that can show video crisp enough to see the smile on someone's face.

And so, once again, general advancements in technology have addressed this problem too.

Sin 3: Slow networks

Video needs a lot more bandwidth than voice. Our iPhone app needs about 600Kb/s to make a decent video call. Until a few years ago, you just couldn't get that kind of speed on a mobile phone. Two things have addressed this:

• The arrival of 3G cellular networks, which often (but not always) have enough bandwidth to carry a mobile video call.

• The widespread availabiity of WiFi on smartphones. WiFi is not without problems, but at least it tends to provide the bandwidth needed for a video call. Fortunately, many calls - video or otherwise - happen in either the home or the workplace. Those are the two places many users have WiFi enabled on their phones.

Put together, WiFi and 3G cellular networks mean that bandwidth is available in many more locations, making video calls possible.

Sin 4: Slow processors

Video not only requires more bandwidth than voice; it requires more CPU resources too. Encoding a QVGA video stream on a typical smartphone consumes a sizeable percentage of the CPU resources when performed in the main processor. Higher resolutions are out of reach of the CPU, and require hardware assistance from dedicated encoding chips.

To be fair, this isn't just a problem for mobile phones - it's still a problem for PCs. The typical modern PC is still not powerful enough to encode an HD video stream in realtime. Even VGA doesn't work on many PCs yet. No surprise that it is barely possible on the majority of mobile devices.

The situation around hardware acceleration of video encoding and decoding is also a big problem right now. On some platforms, there is hardware accelerated functionality, but it is not available to third-party applications like Skype, and iOS is an example of this. Facetime uses hardware acceleration to improve quality, but those improvements are not available through the iOS API.

The problem isn't just about raw CPU horsepower. It's also about latency. Realtime communications - both voice and video - are really sensitive to delays. For an ideal experience, you want the amount of time it takes between when one person speaks to when the other person hears to be under 150 milliseconds.

Think about it like this: In order to have a mobile video call, video frames must be captured from the camera, sent through the phone hardware, and processed by the software on the phone - on both sides, all in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately, the video camera systems on many phones were designed for streaming video and recording, which has much more relaxed delay requirements. As a result, many phones on the market today have hundreds of milliseconds of delay just for capturing a video frame and making it available to the software on the phone. The problem is even more complex on Android, where the variety of different phones, each with differing hardware and designs, make life even harder for developers like Skype.

Sin 5: Poor UI

It's amazing how easy it is to design a bad UI. The UI for mobile video has to make it dead simple to use. It's easy to focus on the obvious stuff - selecting contacts, making the call, hanging up the call. But the harder stuff has to be handled too.

The biggest hurdle is figuring out whether the person you want to call has the right equipment in the first place. This isn't specific to video - it has been a major complaint of users in adoption of online communication products in general. For video, we now have to factor in the question of whether the person you want to call has a camera or not. Does the device they are on even support video? How do you let the person you want to call know that everything is 'ready' in intuitive ways? How do you identify and find people who you can call?

Then there are other complexities - do you allow people to make voice-only calls? What about shutting off video? How does the other side know that a video shut-off is not a consequence of a problem? Should you let them know that the sender cancelled their video or does that complicate the UI? How do you let the other side know that your video is being received?

These problems are surmountable, but will require time and investment in UI.

These items - the cameras, the screens, the processors, the networks, and the UI - all of them are likely to improve over time with the never-ending improvements in technology. However, even if we eliminate all of these problems, there are others which technology itself is unlikely to solve. Those are the problems I'll be covering in my next posts.

* For the fourth quarter 2010
** TeleGeography, January 2011

Skype 1.1 for Symbian

We have released a new version of Skype for Symbian.

In this version we have been focused on improving user experience on Skype.

We have added also a support for Sony Ericsson Satio, Vivaz, Vivaz Pro devices and also to few new Nokia models.

Head to Skype.com/m from your mobile to get the new version now or install via computer using installers for touchscreen or non-touchscreen devices.

We have improved Skype's login time and responsivness in this release and also reduced battery consumption up to 20%.

We've made in the apps user inteface where we have done quite a big overhaul, you'll see changes in - account panel, some keys assignements, settings panel. There are also few new options introduced for controlling notifications, using your mobile phone number as outgoing SMS sender and setting default file receiving locations on device.

Please let us know what you think about Skype for Symbian on our forums.

The full release notes for Skype 1.1.0 for Symbian are:

Improvements:
* Added support for new device models : Sony Ericsson Satio, Vivaz, Vivaz Pro, added additional Nokia phones to supported list.
* Improved performance during signing in.
* Reduced power usage up to 20%
* Overhauled the user interface
* Added support for showing your phone number as SMS sender.
* Added option to choose time frame for remembering history on the device.
* Added option for setting default file receiving location.
* Skype now stores your prefered connection option.
* Added option to turn Audio/ Vibration notification on and off (Vibration notification respects phone profile settings.)
* Added support for showing flags in Instant Messaging window for touchscreen devices

Fixed issues:
* Fixed issue with displaying native address book contacts in Contacts view.
* If no subscription was purchased, the Subscription status in My Info displayed the Skype Credit expiration date.
* The custom voicemail greeting could not be deleted on touchscreen devices.
* The word "Notification" was not localized on touchscreen devices.
* Skype, on Nokia N78, crashed if the user tried to save a network connection as the default. This behavior has been changed in version 1.1.
* When receiving a file while Skype was running in the background, file receiving was cancelled on Nokia N97 and N97 mini.
* Verified mobile phone number was not carried over from another Skype client to Skype for Symbian.

Known issues:
* On Nokia E71 automatic switching to number input in dial numbers field does not happen on devices with QWERTY keyboard
Current solution: User need to switch input type manually via keyboard key
* Unblock option is missing from Contact list on non-touchscreen devices
Current solution: User needs to un-block contact from desktop client.
* With non-touchscreen devices no error message is displayed if new account is created with empty email field. Error icon is still displayed besides e-mail field
Current solution: None available
* Voicemail playback audio is mixed with regular PSTN call on Nokia E72
Current solution: None available
* No volume control via Hardware keys on Nokia N95
Current solution: Volume can be controlled by pressing Joystick left or right.
* Sign out cannot be completed if initiated when client is not connected to network
Current solution: Reconnect manually before signing out or exit client.
* On Nokia touchscreen devices voice is lost if SMS is received during a Skype call
Current solution: Voice can be reactivated by putting the call on hold or sometimes switching between loudspeaker and phone.
* On touchscreen devices widget backgroup uses wallpaper picture if it has been set instead of theme background
Current solution: None available
* Can't sign for the first time when 'Ask when needed' is selected at connection prompt.
Current solution: Add Wlan of 3G access point to a Destination before starting the client.
* Text in input fields on sign in/new account is unreadable on Sony Ericsson Vivaz, Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro, Sony Ericsson Satio with default black theme. Text is white on white or bright gray background is totally invisible.
Current solution: Default theme issue with color scheme. Usage of other theme resolves this problem.
* On touchscreen devices client tabs are not refreshed if theme is changed during client runtinme. Sony Ericsson only: Icons and tabs in client may disappear during client first start after theme change during client runtime.
Current solution: Device firmware problem, cannot be fixed in client. Restarting or opening/closing client resolved this problem.
* Password entry not masked while entrying it via virtual keyboard on tochscreen devices
Current solution: None available
* If two online numbers are purchased for an account and each has a different expiry date, the correct expiry date is shown for only one online number
Current solution: None available
* In some cases the user's voicemail greeting type (custom or default) is not displayed correctly
Current solution: None available
* Using the Accept button to accept a sent file does not work on Nokia 6730
Current solution: Use the middle software key to accept a file.
* When answering an incoming phone call whilst listening to Skype's voicemail, the audio of both will be mixed on Nokia E72
Current solution: None available
* On Nokia 5800 calling fails on devices with initial firmware release
Current solution: Update your phone's firmware.
* Occasionally, the call end button does not respond to key presses during a call on Nokia N97 and N97 mini
Current solution: Updating your phone's firmware will improve the experience.
* It may be confusing that when sending an IM or SMS, the text entry field begins with the word "Password:" on Nokia 5530
Current solution: Updating your phone's firmware will improve the experience.
* Application may crash occasionally after first start on Nokia N85
Current solution: Upgrading the phone's firmware to the latest release reduces the risk of crashing.

Supported devices:

Non-touch platform (S60 3rd Edition , Feature Packs 1 and 2) - Download
Nokia N76
Nokia N78
Nokia N79
Nokia N81
Nokia N81 8Gb
Nokia N82
Nokia N85
Nokia N95
Nokia N95 8Gb
Nokia N96
Nokia 5320
Nokia 5700
Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 6120
Nokia 6210 Navigator
Nokia 6220 classic
Nokia 6290
Nokia E51
Nokia E63
Nokia E66
Nokia E71
Nokia E90
New models supported in this version:
Nokia 6730 Classic
Nokia N 86-1 8MP
Nokia 5730 ExpressMusic
Nokia E 52 -1
Nokia E 75

Touch platform (S60 5th Edition) - Download
Nokia N97
Nokia N97 mini
Nokia 5530
Nokia 5800
Nokia X6
New models supported in this version:
Nokia 5230
Sony Ericsson Satio
Sony Ericsson Vivaz
Sony Ericsson Vivaz PRO