Hands On With Skype for Windows Phone 8 - PC Magazine

Skype might be the killer app for Windows Phone 8. On the new Windows Phones, Skype will work just like phone calls - you'll be able to call anyone any time, and receive calls just as if they were ordinary phone calls.

The app won't quite be running in the background, Microsoft told me. Since Microsoft owns Skype, Skype calls and messages will send an alert from Microsoft's servers to Windows Phones, waking up Skype on those phones when necessary. That will make Skype more reliable than it is on iOS and Android, where the OSes sometimes shut down the app when they need free memory. It'll also make Skype much more battery-efficient than on Android, where it needs to lurk in the background to capture incoming requests.

Skype isn't 100 percent working yet - Microsoft couldn't actually show me a video call in progress - but the company did show me the new UI.

Like all flagship Windows Phone apps, Skype has a "live tile" that shows how many messages you have, and who they're from. New messages also appear as alerts at the top of the screen.

While Skype has its own contact book in the app, it's also integrated into the People hub - you can make Skype calls directly from People. That said, the app could go a little farther to integrate into the OS: the chat interface doesn't look like part of the built-in Messaging app, and you can't jump to Skype from the phone dialer. 

When you receive a Skype call, it looks just like a phone call, except that accepting it opens the Skype app. You can Skype anyone at any time, and you can get Skyped at any time. That means every Windows Phone comes with super-low international calling rates and the ability to make free video calls to most of the Internet. That's a big deal.

If you're looking for more of a walkthrough, check out Skype's own comprehensive blog post.

Why Carriers Might Like Skype
I asked the three initial Windows Phone carriers, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, whether they'll allow perpetual Skype use on all data plans. They haven't gotten back to me yet. AT&T has restricted the use of Apple's similar FaceTime to a certain set of data plans; Verizon allows that app on any data plan.

But there are reasons carriers might welcome more Skyping. Most cell-phone plans nowadays come with unlimited voice; think of voice calls as the base price of your service plan rather than as the price of any specific service any more. If you think you're going to get away with a cheaper service plan because you use Skype a lot, you don't know carriers; if Skype becomes properly, they'll probably just only allow Windows Phones to work with unlimited voice plans.

Skyping shifts calling from older 2G networks to the new, more-efficient 4G networks that carriers actually want you to be using. That means carriers can eventually shift spectrum from 2G over to 4G, which they want to do. Skyping also shifts calls onto now-limited data plans, letting carriers upsell larger data plans for heavier users.

All of the carriers want to get rid of 2G eventually, and they want to get rid of old-style voice calling eventually. It's going to take them years, but Skype could help them get there. So I'd expect the carriers to take a friendly approach to Skypers.

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