Thanks for understanding the question Dan. I do use gizmo, unfortunately nobody else I know does or has ever heard of it. Thanks for the responses. Although Skype with video has been available for Linux for quite a while, apparently there is no motivation to port it to ARM? I was hoping to hear somebody say efforts are underway or it's being worked on or something, but I just don't think they care? Hope I'm wrong

I believe there is some reason that Skype doesn't have video on the tablet. Nokia was already very successful moving Adobe to an ARM port of Flash 9 last year, so I think with Sykpe there are technical issues preventing video from running on the tablet.

The Skype protocol is completely encrypted and heavily obfuscated to not be detectable by packet filtering systems (have you every tried detecting a Skype stream with rule-based inspection? it's impossible, you'd need advanced statistics analysis). This takes some CPU power. Maybe the current tablets just can't handle encrypting video for the Skype protocol?

I could be very wrong here, but I strongly suspect that it can't be THAT taxing, seeing as how Skype generally works with a teeny 320x240 image and the Nokia has a DSP to help the CPU out with signal processing so.. that's even more horsepower to the cause. If Gizmo can do it and do it without any real hiccups at all--why not?

I'm completely guessing here but I'd wager that it's related more to interest over at Skype and whether they want to prioritize any real money and man-hours to getting the video portion ported over to ARM right now when they're really aiming for the desktop. (In my opinion, a mistake what with more than just the tablets using ARM that COULD use their software.)

As for how secure Skype is.. weren't there recent articles about how INSECURE it is? ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/26/152239 and several about how it can be buffer overrun crashed leading to exploits )

Meh.