Camera Phones Plaza

After reading some topics in various forums, and seeing that more and more people would like to get the Skype Mobile application on their Motorola Q phone, I compiled some solutions, and here it is the best way to use it on your mobile phone:

Skype doesn't list Motorola as an option on the brand list of compatible mobile devices, and it is pretty hard to find the .cab file where these compatibilities are stored. For getting this .cab  file on your phone, there are two solutions.

For downloading this .cab file directly to your phone, you should navigate to this page , and accept a 3.86 Mb file download, called "SkypeForSmartphone_Beta.CAB". After you accept, it will be downloaded, some typical installation prompts will appear, and a Skype icon will be added to the Start menu. If the installation process fails, try it again: go to the page, and download the .cab and then go through the installation steps.

Another possibility is to download the EXE and install it from the PC, or download the .cab for later installation. For this, you will have to browse to the file's location with the File Manager. Installing Skype Mobile will change your Home Screen to the Skype's home screen, which is pretty large and ugly, with the specific color scheme. Changing it back can be done from Settings-> Home Screen. If you want to add the Skype Mobile plugin into your Home Screen XML file, there are instructions at the end of this article.

If you launch Skype, it will tell you “Please note that a WiFi connection could not be found". Ignore this message, because it is true, Motorola Q doesn't have any WiFi connection, and this means that Skype will use the EVDO connection to communicate. When you launch it for the first time, it will require the login information.

Skype for mobile phones is pretty cool, because all the contacts, phone numbers and history are automatically loaded from the servers and they can be used from your mobile phone. When you will re-login, it won't be necessary to configure it again, like you sometimes have to do on the PC. There can be run multiple copies of Skype without problems, and you can easily use the PC and mobile version. All the things you typed on the Skype PC version will appear on the mobile one, and the other way around, and it is pretty cool,because you can keep track of your conversations, even if they had been typed on the PC or on the mobile device.

Text messaging works great on mobile devices, but the voice quality is very choppy, and you actually can't use the phone calling feature, even if Skype offers the possibility of dialing out and in. I think it is better to use the phone part for voice communication, and you could use the Skype voice feature for reading the voicemail, but it is quite sketchy. In time, both Motorola and Skype will improve their features, and in short time, the call quality will improve with technology's progess.

Here is the XML sequence you should insert in the XML page of Home Screen, in order to make the Skype plugin to appear. You should add this to the bottom of the code, or wherever you want Skype Mobile to be placed.