Skype goes Video!!

Yeah that’s right, Skype 2.0 has video calling feature in it, which has long been expected by users. And what’s more, a new goodie to the pack will be a toolbar for Microsoft’s email client Outlook, using which users will be able to dial & connect to their contacts using the address book in Outlook!!

Skype 2.0 was launched on Thursday, December 1st 2005, but its was a beta version and video is only available for Windows, Mac users have to wait for it(the latest for them is 1.4 beta)!! Squashing many rumours that came to life after eBay gobbled up Skype last month by paying a king’s ransom of $2.6 billion in stock & cash, Skype still remains free and the video calling feature is also free!! After that buyout, a lot of people speculated that eBay will start charging a fee for using Skype, though I think that I should’ve have put a wager on that, I certainly would’ve won!!

And now that the final stable release of v2.0 is out(launched December 2nd, 2005), it surely looks pretty cool!! Along with better call quality, the new version of Skype also has a search box that can search the address book of the user and that same thing can be done with the Outlook toolbar that it comes with. Besides that, v2.0 also supports PNG format along with the previously supported BMP & JPEG formats. And some personalisation features have been added to this new release as well, like ringtones & moods(which display how contacts on your buddy list are feeling).

I think that the video feature will be quite good. This feature has been in IM clients like Yahoo!, AOL etc. but they haven’t caught on, just like their voice chat features. Though I’ve not tried it yet, but I think that if Skype is using a good video compression, then it’ll be a hit like their VoIP as better compression means faster video even on slow internet connections. For the video chat, you’d ofcourse need to stick up a webcam on your PC, something which is not extraordinary these days and a lot of laptops are also coming out with factory fitted webcams. And just like Skype has partenered with some phone makers to sell Skype ready phone instruments, I think they might just get around to selling some Skype branded webcams as well!!

If this is good enough for you, then you can go ahead and download Skype 2.0 for Windows or you can read the changelog to see what exactly they added and fixed!!