Skype has announced today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has joined with Verizon Wireless and will be availble on a number of the company’s phones.
The partnership brings Skype to both Blackberry and Android platforms on Verizon Wireless phones, which will be shipped beginning in March with Skype pre-installed. Skype over 3G will allow international call at rates unavailable over traditional wireless carriers.
Skype will be available on a number of Verizon phones, “BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8330, Curve 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630 smartphones, as well as DROID by Motorola, DROID ERIS by HTC and Motorola DEVOUR.”
Skype was recently allowed back on the iPhone for use over AT&T’s 3G network with the release of the new iPhone SDK, but has yet to be seen in the app store. The word on the street there is that it has been submitted but Apple has yet to approve it. Today’s partnership announcement puts Skype onto an even greater number of smartphones – Verizon Wireless has over 90 million wireless customers.
“More and more, what’s happening is that your mobile phones are really just personal computers in your pocket,” said Skype CEO Josh Silverman in a video on the company’s blog.”And people want to use those computers … to communicate.”
With this release, people will be able to communicate very cheaply. We took a quick look and compared Skype’s international calling rates to those on Verizon Wireless and we’re talking a big difference here in some cases.
For example, calling France on Skype costs $0.024 per minute, whereas Verizon charges $0.17. The Verizon rate is nearly eight times the rate offered by Skype and even that is when we assume the caller is paying the $3.99 monthly fee for an international calling plan. Without the plan, the caller pays a whopping, in comparison, $1.66 per minute.
