Nokia opens door to VOIP with Skype deal
Voice on your mobile could be coming to an end
Nokia and Skype have announced that they will be offering VOIP calls for all owners of Symbian-enabled Finnish phones.
In a joint statement, which TechRadar hopes was read out with spokespeople from both parties struggling to speak in unison, Skype for Symbian was formally announced.
The service will work over 3G, Wi-Fi and apparently even EDGE and GPRS, which would be impressive given the limited amount of data speed offered by the latter.
Skype for Symbian will run on any Nokia smartphone using Symbian ^1, the current version of the platform.
Moving on up
However, Skype will soon introduce this client to Symbian mobile devices from other manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson.
"Symbian enables us to bring smartphones to more and more people and ensures scale for our solutions and compelling services, such as Skype," said Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President for Smartphones, Nokia.
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"We're seeing around 1.5 million downloads a day on Ovi Store now and believe that the Skype client for Nokia smartphones will have wide appeal to Symbian users."
The service has been enabled for a long time through third party providers, such as Fring, but this is the first time VOIP has been enabled by an official manufacturer.
The Nokia N900 is also able to make VOIP calls through Skype, although this uses Maemo as an OS rather the Symbian version announced today.
Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grew with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.