Skype released version 2.1 of their video-enabled Android software this morning, bringing more supported devices with it this time.
If you’ve been following the development here, Skype 2.0’s release a little over a month ago brought us video support for only a handful of Android phones. Shortly thereafter, a hacked version was made available that raised the restriction and was reported to work on just about any phone running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) that sported a front facing camera.
With Skype’s new update, they now support a grand total of 17 Android devices for video calls. But there’s a catch. The requirement is that these devices must run Gingerbread to use the front facing camera. Sounds like this update only brought us what the hacked version already had.
Before you dismiss this release as nothing new, there’s another announcement. If you’re running Android 2.2 (Froyo) on one of their supported devices, you can access the rear camera for video chat. They go on to state that even if you don’t own one of their supported devices, there’s a chance you can continue to use the rear camera for video chat, which is the bit I personally found most interesting.
Why would I want to use the rear camera to video chat? Well, you can always use a mirror or the like to reflect the screen or camera back to you, but that’s kind of impractical. The reason I find this interesting is because it means I can receive video feeds from other people who do have front facing cameras. You see, it always bothered me that just because I don’t have a front facing camera I should be denied seeing other people who do. The option to video chat was disabled on phones that weren’t capable of it previously, only audio calls were allowed. Additionally, some Android tablets like the Viewsonic G-tablet and certain Archos models have only one camera, facing the front. When an Android device only has one camera, it is registered to the system as the “rear”, which means you could technically get this working on those tablets for video calls.
Now, that being said, I wasn’t able to get it working on any of my Froyo devices. I tried it on the Viewsonic G-Tablet as well as an LG Optimus S, and neither one gave me the option for video chat in settings. According to Skype’s announcement:
“Unfortunately, if you cannot see the video calling settings, it means your Android phone does not meet the minimum requirements needed to make Skype video calls. ”
B0llocks. Yahoo Messenger works on this hardware, as does Oovoo, Fring, and others. In fact, months ago some of you might remember a leaked Skype beta that supported video chat until they remotely killed access to it. Looks like I’ll be waiting for the brilliant minds at XDA-Developers to hack this one open for more devices like last time.
Speaking of which, you might be wondering what this Gingerbread requirement is all about. After all, other applications such as Fring, Tango, Yahoo Video chat, Oovoo with the front facing camera, and even the aforementioned old Skype beta all work while using Froyo.
The answer is that until Gingerbread, front cameras didn’t have a standard API for developers to access. Only the rear camera was standard, and application developers had to figure out how to access each front camera individually, which lead to some applications only working on specific devices. Now that there is a standard camera API, it takes all the guesswork out of trying to access the camera and creates easier to manage and support your software for future devices.
I think we’ll see that future video chat applications will have the same 2.3 Gingerbread requirement from now on.
tnx