Are you prepared to have your mind blown? As expected, Skype for iPhone will appear “sometime Tuesday” and allow you to make VoIP calls to friends and family all over the world, a move that at once blows a great waft of flatulence in the face of the carriers and, in one smooth motion, high fives the international community of Skype users.
It should be available from the App Store for free.
UPDATE – OMG! It’s also coming to the Blackberry in May!
You obviously cannot make a Skype call over 3G or EDGE but you can make VoIP calls over Wi-Fi. The system also meshes with your iPhone contacts and allows you to filter and search based on users who already have Skype accounts and even make SkypeOut calls, again under Wi-Fi.
You can also chat with friends and family using the iPhone’s keyboard and the system brings in avatars from your Skype sessions.
VoIP has long been a bugaboo for the carriers and the addition of Skype essentially blows their arguments a new one. Skype is a formalized, popular app and the outcry if they had “banned” it would have been mighty. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and now we can have our VoIP calls and chatting without fear of harsh and righteous retribution.