Skype and the Nokia Lumia 610: Here's the current situation. (Video)

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

As you may or may not recall, Skype for Windows Phone officially does not run on Windows Phone "Tango" hardware--devices with 256MB of RAM or less--like the Lumia 610 and ZTE Orbit. But Justin Angel from Nokia called up our podcast from his Lumia 610 using Skype and it sounded great, what's more Nokia themselves seemed okay with it too.

Then two days ago, word came out that Nokia with withdrawing support for Skype and the Lumia 610, causing even more confusion i.e. so is it available at least for those who want to run it?

Truth be told it's not available to download. As can be seen in the image above, users are given a notice that they cannot download the app. However, if we sideload version 1.1 of Skype onto our 610, it works just fine as you can see in our video below.

So what's the deal? We'll take Nokia's word that there are performance issues (we tested over WiFi and it seemed fine) and that's the reason why users won't have access to it. However, to us Skype for the Lumia 610 appears to be okay, at least from our limited testing.

What we're hoping for is with a version 1.2 or later, Skype and Microsoft can hammer out any performance problems and get the app on to Tango hardware. Because to us, it seems like they're very close to achieving just that making this a temporary problem with the platform.

See our hands on and unboxing of the Lumia 610 here.

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

7 Comments
  • I'm liking that they tell you why an app can't run, hopefully I won't see it myself for a while though.
  • Good thing they saved that 29 cents per phone by skimping on the ram.
  • Seriously, this 256MB chassis should never have been made. It's been 2 years since WP came out with 512MB, that's nothing now. I looked at the BOM for some phone teardown. The 512MB RAM cost $5 a year ago I believe. So they probably saved a whole $2 making it 256MB and have just caused issues that should never have existed. 
  • Microsoft and Nokia have a new show: smoked by Skype !
     
  • How to get Skype's installation file to sideload?
  • design interferes with decal skins, only back cover skin is supported because if you put a decal skin on the front, the skin itself blocks out sensor communication causing phone to freeze!
  • stupid this. skyped runs, albeit very stripped down, on my old SE Cedar. it also worked on a Samsung Galaxy Spica I had, neither of these has more than 256MB ram.... lazy coding....