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Making Skype calls with your Series 60 phone

Something I’ve wanted to do with my phone ever since I got my first S60 device was to make Skype calls to save money. Although there has been talk about a Skype client for the S60 platform for quite a while there still hasn’t been any releases from Skype.

There have been many different tries to get Skype on Series 60 devices, everything from SIP gateways to using your phone as a bluetooth headset for your computer. None of these solutions provided what I wanted, an easy way to make Skype calls without having to be at my computer.

Fortunately, even though Skype still hasn’t released a client of their own, there now is a simple and working way to use Skype on your phone. While browsing around the internet i found fring, a client that allows you to not only talk and chat using Skype, but also Google Talk, MSN Messenger, SIP, Twitter and its own fring protocol. Best of all, it is free!

I’ve only tried fring with my Nokia E70, so all observations on call quality and speed are based on that. The client is available for most Nokia S60 devices, Sony Ericsson P990i, most Windows Mobile devices such as HP, HTC and Motorola.

Obtaining fring

Go to the fring download page and choose your phone type and enter your country and phone number. You will then be sent a SMS containing a download link. You will not be charged for the SMS.

Once downloaded, install the software as you would any other software. You may get a security warning due to mismatched certificates, answer Yes to continue.

Your fring user-id is always your telephone number in international format (i.e. with the country prefix). This way your friends can easily find you and call you using fring instead of regular voice call.

Note. If you have tried Fring before you need to enter the same password as then. Use fring password recovery if you can’t remember it.

In the first screen you can choose which services you wish to connect to, fring is always enabled.

By default you will see all your contacts in the same list, also your phone contacts. fring can be used as a replacement for the default screen, enabling you to make calls to both regular contacts and fring contacts.

You can hide your phone contacts from Options->Settings if you wish to use fring only as a Skype client. There you can also enable or disable autostart of the application.

Tips and info

As fring uses data for everything you do make sure you have a flat-rate data plan or only use wlan or you could easily get much larger bills than you would expect.

Some sample data rates for fring on Symbian phones from their about page :

• about 8MB/h for calling
• 0.05kB per instant message
• about 10kB/h for connectivity

Using fring will consume noticably more battery than usual, but you should easily manage a day without charging with a decently good battery.

Call quality on a 3G network is fine, although a bit muddy. Quality on WLAN is good. Trying to call on anything less than 3G will result in quite bad quality calls.

SkypeOut is supported, but I haven’t tried it yet, however I don’t see any reason that the quality would be any worse for that.