Skype On The Go

EQO Communications announced the rollout of its EQO Mobile Internet Phone Service for Skype onto the J2MEE platform yesterday. The move will enable some 150 million J2MEE-compliant mobile phones to see the presence status of their buddies, send and receive text messages to other Skype users, and start multiparty chat sessions, as well as place and receive Skype calls. The EQO client runs on Nokia, Motorola and Sony-Ericsson handsets.

EQO is hardly the first to deliver mobile Skype, but it is the first to deliver it on such a breadth of telephones. ISkoot announced a Skype service similar to Eqo's service last month, but only for high-end Nokia Series 60 handsets ( 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6682, 7610, N70).

Skype itself has been part of this charge. The company announced Skype for the Pocket PC 2.0, enabling any Windows Mobile Pocket PC with Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC to Skype other buddies across Wi-Fi or 3G networks. The Skype client is preloaded on a number of devices, including the new HP iPAQ hw6900 series PDA. Skype is also working with Hutchinson 3 Group for work on its 3G networks, a series of networks that span 10 markets and over 11 million customers worldwide.

At the same time, Connectotel provided an SMS gateway that translates between SMS messages Skype IM. The Skype-SMS gatetway, however, does not offer the telephony nor presence information provided by EQO or ISkoot.

The EQO services are available for free download.