AFAICT, that's indeed all you know.

Skype is not open-source; it is still closed-source, and nobody but Skype makes clients. (Well, there was that incident where someone in China claimed to have reverse engineered it; I never heard of anything resulting though, and it's definitely not "opened up".)

IMHO their cilent on the tablets is pretty good, it's easier to use than most Maemo apps and it's worked fine for me in the year or so it's been out. Even though there were compatibility problems with the N810 mentioned above, the OS2008 version of Skype has even better sound quality than the previous version.

It has started dropping calls more often lately, but I suspect that's something to do with the networks used by Skype rather than the app itself.

Well, I find Skype on the tablets rather disappointing. It's lacking send and receive files capability, and it's substantially resolution-dependent, which gets havoced by xrandr. I understand being behind Windows as far as their x86 Linux version is, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me that it should so far behind the x86 version.

I'm guessing the vast majority of Skype users don't care about anything except free calls.

If it lets you talk to people without paying anything (or by paying a substantially cheaper rate on SkypeOut), then that's probably all that most people would be looking for.

Video chat would definitely be a very popular feature with mainstream audiences, and it's surprising they haven't included that in the tablet version, but it's the voice calls that are the star.

And unlike the PC version of Skype, you can actually walk round the house with the tablet so you can talk in private, or keep it near you so you can receive calls.


Erm... what does that actually mean?

Well, "resolution-dependent" means everything is drawn at fixed pixel sizes, in fixed positions, such that it will look nice on an 800x480 display. But if the display is sized differently, and especially if it is smaller in either direction, parts of it will be inaccessible.

xrandr is the extension used for rotating the screen, for portrait mode.

"Havoced" is the past tense of havoc, a noun which I have gleefully verbed to describe the result of trying to fit 800x480 into 480x800:

Note that scrunching the contacts list down (with a scrollbar, if necessary) could have left all controls accessible. But lazy programmers know they're coding for a certain size of screen, and then when someone introduces a new feature, their work is exposed as the junk it is...

I take your point about non-neat programming, and it's a shame it doesn't support screen rotation, but as before I don't personally think this matters to a typical tablet user.

If you want to see a really really badly done client, check out the official Skype client for mobile phones: it DOESN'T SUPPORT FREE CALLS. Everything else works but NO FREE CALLS, you're charged at the normal call rate, which makes the whole client a bit pointless. It lets you make foreign calls with SkypeOut, but you have to pay your usual mobile call charges on top of the SkypeOut charges.

The irony is that I can access free Skype through my phone, but only by using it as a modem for my tablet.