Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

Just asking.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

yes... but you could use gizmo...

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

Or even the built in SIP client... It supports video.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

You could give up on anything, at any time. I expect it'll arrive sooner or later, with a greater probability of later. Whether it'll be backwards-compatible with current tablets is a good question, though. It should be.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

I don't believe Gizmo will communicate with Skype clients. I assume he meant to ask about Skype specifically because of Skype's specific protocol.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

There's always the possibility that if it takes too long for them to bother porting it over with video.. they may just abandon the whole idea eventually.

After all, this IS closed-source software we're talking about and it's not like someone with a need and some talent could take up the cause and run with it.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

It's possible, yes. But they've kept up with it thus far, and I don't think devices in this class are likely to get scarcer, so it's unlikely that its priority drops. (I think it's likely that a simplified client like the N8x0 one goes into some of the other (x86) Linux-based non-desktop-UI devices, and if they develop that starting from the ARM port rather than the current Linux-x86 port, it shouldn't be all that much more to keep both architectures, and build for both. At that point, they're going to have some motivation to add video.)

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

The skype client just seems way too resource intensive to ever support video. I have a feeling major optimizations would be needed to pull this off.... and I doubt it's going to happen.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

As much as I used to like Skype.. now that I use SIPphone (Gizmo).. I just prefer, instead, to just ask my friends and family to use that or ANY SIP service. :P At least then they aren't tethered to one service. Competition and standardized protocols is always better for us. Even if I don't like the Gizmo client, I could always use any number of other third party clients that DO work (and I have tried out many--still prefer Gizmo's interface so far).

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

Naah. Well, yeah, they'll release support after you stopped caring about it and have moved on to something else.

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

Thanks for understanding the question Dan. I do use gizmo, unfortunately nobody else I know does or has ever heard of it. Thanks for the responses. Although Skype with video has been available for Linux for quite a while, apparently there is no motivation to port it to ARM? I was hoping to hear somebody say efforts are underway or it's being worked on or something, but I just don't think they care? Hope I'm wrong

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

I believe there is some reason that Skype doesn't have video on the tablet. Nokia was already very successful moving Adobe to an ARM port of Flash 9 last year, so I think with Sykpe there are technical issues preventing video from running on the tablet.

The Skype protocol is completely encrypted and heavily obfuscated to not be detectable by packet filtering systems (have you every tried detecting a Skype stream with rule-based inspection? it's impossible, you'd need advanced statistics analysis). This takes some CPU power. Maybe the current tablets just can't handle encrypting video for the Skype protocol?

Re: Is it safe to give-up on Skype w video for N8xx yet?
 

I could be very wrong here, but I strongly suspect that it can't be THAT taxing, seeing as how Skype generally works with a teeny 320x240 image and the Nokia has a DSP to help the CPU out with signal processing so.. that's even more horsepower to the cause. If Gizmo can do it and do it without any real hiccups at all--why not?

I'm completely guessing here but I'd wager that it's related more to interest over at Skype and whether they want to prioritize any real money and man-hours to getting the video portion ported over to ARM right now when they're really aiming for the desktop. (In my opinion, a mistake what with more than just the tablets using ARM that COULD use their software.)

As for how secure Skype is.. weren't there recent articles about how INSECURE it is? ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/26/152239 and several about how it can be buffer overrun crashed leading to exploits )

Meh.