We are at the 4th quarter of the year and the Smartphone market is hyped, by many factors, good and bad changes happened in the recent past that I wanted to discuss and mention in this post.
I seriously think changes that are done to adopt to the ever growing market are done too fast by big companies without being well thought regarding the effects this has to the users.
E.g. Skype now informs you via a pop-up that Skype Desktop API will be discontinued by December this year, making many plugins and even commercial programs like Pamela and Messenger Plus! for Skype will be no longer available for use.
This also affects hobby projects like my C64 diskmag Scene World, where we use thew Messenger Plus! for Skype Skype plugin to record Skype video interviews with computer industry pionneers for every isssue.
Right now, I do what Pamela suggests (see above) and stick with an older version of Skype. Lucky enough 6.7 for Windows Desktop can be found here.
While this is bad for freeware and commercial solutions that rely on the Skype API, there are now already alternatives that of course use that for marketing. Like SuperTinTin here, which means I have to buy it from my own pocket just to be able to do the Skype videos again in the future. Sad!
Skype reasioning is, that people shall rely on the new Skype URIs that are also used for their mobile smartphone clients. Means less resources neccessary to use for Microsoft developers (Yes, Skype is owned by Microsoft nowadays, and they didn’t kill any platform in contrast to what people were afraid of (a lot of users said “now Linux, and Mac clients will be dead 🙁 ), instead they decided to make the life for the 3rd party Skype applications hard.
Skype explains the reasons in their Support database here and speaks about the road ahead in their “Big Blog” here.
Last but not least let’s look at the statistics of the smartphone world via an info graphic:
This Infographic is produced by Coupon Audit (provides Shoebacca coupon) and Nafcom
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What are your thoughts on this? Technorati Tags: smartphone, Skype