Last week I wrote some first impressions of iSkoot, a new Skype client for Blackberry, and while I still think it’s a very cool idea, I don’t see myself using it all that much. Why not? Very simply…
Battery life!
Or the lack thereof. Yes, indeed, it all does seem to come down to batteries, and iSkoot seems to certainly consume its share of power. Now granted, my Blackberry 7290 is an older model and for all I know could probably use a new battery, but in “normal” operation, I can charge it up and then have it run for a good 3 or 4 days before it needs a recharge. However, start up iSkoot and I found I suddenly needed a recharge by the end of the day!
In fairness, iSkoot is not alone in this… the other Blackberry IM clients I’ve used, both the Windows Messenger client and also most recently the IM+ client for Skype also have this same problem. I’m assuming it has something to do with the need to regularly use the data connection for updates to status and to update chat messages.
I can see this actually being most useful to me when I’m traveling and need to quickly reach someone from within an airport or something like that. Of course, that’s also when I want the longest battery life, too! I think I’ll keep it installed on my BB, but I don’t think I’ll have it running except for those times when I’m somewhere and I want a quick way to do IM via Skype.
Too bad, really, because one of the fun aspects of it was that I had a very easy way to read Twitter updates and Facebook updates on my BB (since I have both Twitter and Facebook status streams piped into a Skype chat).
Ah, the joy of batteries…
battery and features are killing wifi sip devices in general. Skype is a bit different, but all these commerical and Asterisk SIP systems have a major hole – wifi phones. I figured a year ago this hole would be filled by now, but it isn’t happening.
Dect phones with a sip base have the most promise in terms of distance and battery for functional cordless. Kirk (bought by Spectralink bought by Polycom) is supposedly a good product but too expensive.
None of the wifi phones on the market seem to be very good – (if someone knows somethign I don’t – please say). The proprietary solutions like Spectralink are great, but not SIP and not cheap.
It is a mystery to me that this can’t be solved. It is the one thing keeping me from implementing Asterisk in my home. Not interested in star codes via an analog set via TA.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for trying out iSkoot – we appreciate your comments. We are really excited to be on the BlackBerry platform as we round out our smartphone-based offerings. We feel we’ve made some great progress; but as your review aptly points out, we still have a few improvements to make. The battery life issue is certainly a serious concern for us, and we’re working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Some of the additional issues that you mentioned are actually security features in the BlackBerry OS. Specifically, when the user clicks on a name to call a contact, the OS double-checks that the user really intends to make an outgoing call from the application. This prevents unauthorized calls by third-party applications and is a common security feature in almost all mobile platforms.
Of course, we take the issue of password security very seriously. Login and password information are always encrypted. The information is stored on the handset only—never the server—and only in cases where the user selects the auto sign-in option. The communication from the client to our server is also encrypted and secured, using https.
The remaining issues you pointed to are all features that we have on the roadmap. We’re currently working with Skype to improve the real-time contact status, speed up chat message delivery, and resolve the conflict with Skype Voicemail.
Again, Dan – we really appreciate the write-up and love hearing this kind of feedback from users. Your input is incredibly valuable to our efforts towards continually improving our product offerings. As always, we welcome any additional thoughts or suggestions.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline Van Meter
iSkoot Product Management
Jacqueline,
Thank you for taking the time to reply here to the points I raised and to my concerns about the password storage. I don’t know what you (and all the other app vendors) do about the battery issue… hopefully we’ll keep seeing better batteries that provide longer life.
Again, thanks for taking the time to reply,
Dan
Funny – I noticed the same battery issue. What doesn’t make sense, though, is that my BlackBerry is sending data all day – e-mails are constantly going. Now I realise that e-mail isn’t THAT much data, but neither should iSkoot be sending that much data (I’d think it’d send data when logging in, and then maybe once every 5 minutes to update status – which is about how often I get e-mail messages). So yes, it’s installed, but I’ll be keeping it turned off most of the time unless I need to make a call.