Updated Skype for iPhone, Windows and Windows Mobile

By Flora Graham on 01 July 2009, 12:30pm

The coding monkeys at Skype have been hammering away all night on their tiny monkey keyboards to bring us three new versions of the voice-over-IP call-meister.

Skype 3.0 for Windows Mobile is out of beta, bringing file transfer and SMS messages to our WinMo phones. It also sports a wizard for adding new contacts, the ability to block users from your search results, and a splash of paint over Skype 2.5's old look.

Not one (point-one) to be left out, Skype 1.1 has launched on the iPhone. You can now listen to your Skype voicemail and send SMS messages, and there's been some tweaking of the user interface. There's also a heap of language support, including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two flavours of Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and both simplified and traditional Chinese. You'll need at least version 2.2 of the iPhone OS to update to the new Skype.

We particularly like the new SMS feature, since it's so much more polite to text, rather than call, when we have a great idea we just have to share with our friends in Argentina at time-zone-inappropriate moments. That text will only cost us 14.1p using Skype, compared to 19.57p on an O2 pay-as-you-go tariff, for example. A text to a local mobile number cost us 5.6p, rather than 9.79p.

You can download Skype for WinMo directly to your phone by visiting the Skype Web site in your mobile browser, or grab the iPhone version from the Apple App Store.

And if you're still using a big-sized computer that isn't in the shape of a phone, Skype 4.1 for Windows has come out of beta too, and you can download it from the Skype Web site.