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Skype Coming to Nokia Phones but Maybe Not in the States

by Dan Reilly on February 18, 2009 at 05:14 PM



Great news for anyone who's looking to pinch some pennies -- Skype is partnering with Nokia to get its software on the company's newest phones. The first phone to have the cheapo program will be the N97 smartphone, debuting in June.

The phone, and its N-series brethren, will include Skype in its address book to show users when their contacts are online for calls and instant messaging. Using the phone's Internet capabilities, the service will allow users to talk with other Skype customers for free and with everybody else at inexpensive rates using SkypeOut. This is the second partnership involving the eBay-owned company to be announced at this week's GSMA Mobile World Congress; Sony Ericsson will also be including the program in the Windows Mobile Xperia1.

The problem here is that neither Nokia nor Sony Ericsson have anything lined up with a service provider in the United States, which might mean we're out of luck when it comes to Skype-ready mobiles. Although we can't quite figure out why a major company would give their customers a phone that lets them make calls through a different service, we do hope one of these companies figures out a way to bring this feature to us. After all, we can all use another way to save some dough. (For now, though, there's always the UMA service from T-Mobile.) [From: CNET]

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Tags: cellphone, mobileworldcongress2009, nokia, skype, sony ericsson, SonyEricsson, voip

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