The folks at Skype, “don’t yet know how our app will behave on the iPad,” according to a post from the company’s official blogger and “chief Twitterer,” Peter Parkes. Mr. Parkes made the comments on Saturday, April 3rd, the day of the iPad’s release.
Skype has long had a WiFi app for the iPhone on the App Store (version 1.3 was released on January 15th, 2010), and most iPhone apps will operate unmodified on the iPad. Our own informal testing at The Mac Observer has so far found that the Skype app works just fine on the iPad, including both voice and text chat functions.
iPhone apps that have been modified for the iPad tend to make better, or at least different, use of the larger screen real estate and different form factor of the device. The Skype app runs as-is on the iPad, meaning the original interface is offered either in the native 480 x 320 resolution, or in a double-pixel mode that basically super sizes that to 960 x 640.
The company isn’t yet committing to an iPad-optimized version of the app, but Mr. Parkes wrote that, “You can expect to hear more from us about an iPad app in the coming months as we now have our hands on actual iPads and can start tuning and testing.”
We contacted Mr. Parkes to see if there was any new information since his initial post. If we receive a reply, we’ll update this article.
The Skype app is free on the App Store.