Skype Looking To Add Video Calling To Mobile? [Early Word Suggests Big Announcements At CES, Video From Your Cell Among Them]

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It’s been a bad, bad week for Skype users out there–they just dealt with a huge and unexpected block of downtime, and while word of compensation is starting to emerge, a new surprise is also making an appearance: video calling from cell phones.

A support document from Skype emerged that showed a bit of instructional support for users wanting to add mobile video calling, and while video calling isn’t actually part of the latest Skype release for iOS users, the support documents suggest that that’s the next route Skype’s looking to take.

And actually, this makes sense: Skype is available on mobiles, letting you make free calls (to other users, anyway–it’s just really cheap to non-users) and text chats. Skype is available on desktops, which provides everything the mobile versions do plus video chat. So why not add the outstanding feature on desktop versions to the mobile version?

Plus, there’s some peer pressure going on to boot: we all know about Facetime’s video chatting capability, not to mention Fring and Tango. For Skype, currently the big name in the movement, to be out in the cold for any length of time is a surprise that probably should be rectified in short order.

This is still pretty early stage stuff, and only confirmed by leaked support documents, so the idea could go south at any given time, but considering all the market forces currently in play, well, it’s hard to see a reason why Skype wouldn’t want to do this. The tech is there, the competition is already on the field; they might as well join the fray and assert their dominance in the sector. It’s a safe bet that this will get announced at CES, as it’s already been rumored that some big news will come out of Skype at the big show anyway.

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