Last week, Skype and Nokia went on a deal to pre-install Skype on upcoming Nokia N-series devices. This news had been a big story of February 2009 and the geeks are just wondering around for the easiness of free calls over mobiles.

Skype is preparing to launch for Symbian Devices with the upcoming Nokia beast - The Nokia N97. The phone is expected to launch in Q3 of 2009 and will be the first Nokia symbian device ever to have Skype. Making Video calls over the phone will surely be fun but the question is “Will Skype bring the functionality of Video Calling over phone? If so, when?

Skype wont be shipping as a separate application but it will be deeply integrated in Contacts and other services of the phone. This deal seems to be good but the problem comes because of the bandwidth. If the users are in Wi-Fi zone and have access to it, it will be well and good as Wi-Fi is cheaper than 3G and GPRS. On the other hand the 3G network is very limited worldwide and even costly too. GPRS is widely available but cannot handle even voice calls as the connectivity speed is very low.

Still I consider this integration as a useful one because it will let those users who have sufficient mobile bandwidth, communicate for free. However, Skype should also produce a separate application for all the existing devices to make this deal really worth else it will take a longer time to establish themselves.

Fring is also a good alternative already available for the most of the smartphone devices. Not only Nokia but Fring already support a bunch of other companies like HTC, Samsung, LG, Apple’s iPhone and many more. Thus Skype will face a major challenge from Fring as it also supports other popular IM services like Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Fring has already started monetizing from its app and thus Skype is likely to do the same. Advertisements are finally helping VoIP to grow and provide free wireless communication.

Both Skype and Fring target to bring video calls in future smartphones but it is not likely to happen very soon. But once this is done and the bandwidth rates
are cutted, it will really make video calling very easy and economical.