What Does Skype Have to do with iPhone and User Interfaces?

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Clients

August 28th, 2008

iPhone 3G is by far the most hyped phone (or even product) out there today. Everything about it is great - even though you can’t get coverage, have lousy battery life, buggy OS updates and general instability when you call, the party in the Apple AppStore is going on without a stop, with over 30 million dollars of sales in the first month alone.

iPhone

iPhone really changed the mobile handsets market. Other than making the concept of downloading applications feasible (though it is yet to be seen), it made user interfaces on mobile handsets matter.

All of the companies in the value chain of the mobile handsets are looking for ways to develop/enable/provide/support a UI similar to that of the iPhone. Chipset vendors have changed their whole marketing around the number of polygons their platforms support - even when the chipsets are not related to mobile handsets at all.

Skype

What does Skype have to do with it? Nothing really, besides the fact that they can do to multi-core VoIP applications what iPhone is doing to user interfaces.

Skype moved, in its latest v4, to a video centric approach. Instead of doing voice calls, with a bit of instant messaging; they are now positioning themselves as a company doing video telephony, supporting video calls and instant messaging. The whole UI of their latest beta version is built around video. The reason for that? 28% of their calls today are video calls. 28%.

As important as this value is to the growing video conferencing market, I think it is also a huge incentive for people to move to multi-core machines and to increase the bandwidth of the data packages they acquire from their ISP.

Video processing is probably one of the easiest things you can parallelize, and so you can really take advantage of multi-core computing. By leveraging multi-core computing, Skype can provide high definition video telephony to consumers, increasing the quality of experience considerably - something that is relatively impossible with single core PC chips today.

The iPhone showed what was hiding under the flashlight - UI. It’s what is needed to make a great phone, and now every phone vendor is focusing on UI. Skype can do the same for multi-core processing - making it a must for us users by showing high quality video on a desktop is great.

We already have stickers on headsets and webcams stating “Skype Certified”.

Why not have stickers on laptops saying: “Skype HD Certified”?