Skype: We’re Not Going Mobile Just Yet

In an interview with Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Skype CEO and founder Niklas Zennstrom said that due to technical difficulties and a dearth of handsets with the capability of supporting Skype.

“We have no publicly available products yet to offer and I can’t give you a timetable. When we begun developing the mobile phone version we didn’t realize the number of technical obstacles. It is challenging and is taking much longer than expected,” Zennstrom added.

Skype have been working to get their software into handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others and it already runs on some phones using the Windows Mobile OS.

This comes hot on the heels of Jajah’s recent announcement that they are now moving into the mobile VoIP space. While there has been lots of discussion on the usefulness and impact of Jajah (and other web-based VoIP services), Skype’s problems could vindicate advocates of such web-based telephony. While Jajah requires nothing more than a small Java application to run, Skype seems to be much more demanding and therefore difficult to integrate. Just a thought.