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Skype’s marketing machine seems to be working at full speed. Either due to alliances or to actual product developments, these days we’ve been seeing Skype everywhere: four WiFi phones that will allow computer-less calls have been announced; you can purchase USB pen drives including the Skype client, so you can take your IP phone with you; and there are not one, but two new versions of Skype for the Mac, one of them with video.

One would say that such ubiquity by a single company might be taken as arrogant were it you-know-which-companies. However, this is Skype, who allows us to phone free, so everything is forbidden.

The first news is the future availability (they say after September) of four WiFi phones, ready to phone via Skype over a wireless Internet connection. We’d be hard at calling them fixed phones, because they lack a cable and they don’t connect to a computer, but they’re not cellphones either, given the absence of cellular features (neither GSM nor UMTS). Therefore, none of them is a hybrid model, the market for those is estimated by In-Stat to reach 132 million units in the year 2010. However, all of them synchronize automatically with the user’s Skype account and his/her contacts, so while the user remains under WiFi coverage, they allow talking for free with other Skype users, and for a small amount with any user of a standard telephone.

The four sets just announced are made each by a different manufacturer, all of them better known as suppliers of network equipment:

• Belkin F1PP000GN-SK (180 $)
• Edge-Core WM4201
• NETGEAR SPH101 (299 $)
• SMC WSKP100 (199 $)

The four WiFi phones look almost identical, with a candy bar design, standard numeric keypad, call and hangup keys, color display, five-way navigation button and two function keys. Therefore, all of them stem from a single reference design, developed with Taiwan-based Accton, from which Belkin strays a bit, as their model is black while the others are in immaculate iPod white. Functionally they are compatible with WEP, WPA and WPA2 network encryption. Advance orders are already accepted both via Skype’s website and Amazon.com

Skype in a USB pen drive

For those who’d rather continue using Skype on a computer, SanDisk is including the Skype client application in its Flash USB memories from Cruzer Micro and Cruzer Titanium series, so the user can take its IP phone with him/her, including all account data and contacts, and use it from any Internet-connected computer. SanDisk’s Skype packs also include a month of free voice mail service. Cruzer Micros come in capacities from 512 MB (40 $) up to 4 GB (200 $), while Cruzer Titaniums can be of 1 GB (75 $) or 2 GB (120 $). Besides Skype, all of them include applications for managing passwords, synchronizing files and antivirus. They are compatible with Windows 2000 and XP only.

Skype para Macintosh gets video calls at last

Mac users are also getting their share of IP telephony. Via faq-mac.com we learn that you can already download Skype 1.5 for Apple’s OS X operating system, even if a beta (preliminary) version. Actually, this beta provides several performance improvements, but it is mostly a cosmetic upgrade looking more Mac-like. But there’s also another downloadable beta, mucho more interesing, that adds the expected feature of video calling from Mac computers fitted with a webcam, such as the current iMac and MacBook ranges from Apple. Thus Skype for the Mac is now at the same level of features than the Windows version, that has been offering video for months. We have tested this preliminary version for OS X, and found that it works well on Macs with a Power PC processor, as well as on the newer Intel-based models.

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