What’s new in Skype 2.8 for Mac?

Recently, Skype 2.8 for Mac came out from beta, and into official release. This build of the popular voice communication software boasts new features over its predecessor, including: screen sharing, better call quality, and “Skype Access” (”Pay as you go” service using Skype Credit), and more. Do all these features make the experience any better? Lets find out…

Icons

One of the first things you may notice when going around Skype 2.8 for Mac is the new set of icons that go around the whole program. These darker and more polished icons (Some shown on the left), allow it to blend in more better with your Mac OS X Leopard setup.

UI

Skype is becoming more and more popular because of its video chat feature, and while video chatting on the program has not changed much, users may notice that a lot of Skype’s UI changes revolve around the video chat feature. The developers of Skype have created more access points for the software’s video chat feature, most notably in the text chat and main call windows, where they have added video chat and screen sharing icons in the upper portion of the windows

Call Quality

In order to test call quality, I compared the sound of the “Skype Test Call” from my iMac, with Skype 2.7, and from my MacBook Pro, with Skype 2.8 (Using a pair earphones to listen in on calls made on both builds of Skype). In my opinion, the call quality is way better on Skype 2.8; voices sounded “clearer”, “crisper”, and just” brilliant” on 2.8, while calls on 2.7 sounded more “hollow” and “muffled”. Also, these improvements in voice quality were also heard when I called a few toll-free landlines, and someone on my Skype contact list, meaning that conversations on Skype 2.8 for Mac (personally) sounded better than 2.7. Overall, the sound quality is noticeably better on Skype 2.8.

New Feature: Screen Sharing

Many similar applications to Skype, like Oovoo and Apple’s iChat, allow you to “screen share”, or the ability to monitor one’s computer screen, in call. This feature, for a long time, was missing from Skype, and was a quite popular request among the Skype community. Well, Skype 2.8 now has screen sharing as a new feature, and it works great.

Starting up the screen sharing is very easy. All you have to do is hit the “Share” button: in the call window, or in the text chat window. Then choose if you want to share the whole screen, or a portion of it. Then, if the user at the receiving end has a version of Skype that has screen sharing enabled, a separate window will appear on that person’s computer, showing your shared screen. If he/she is not running a version of Skype without screen sharing, the shared screen will appear in the person’s call window, as if it were a video feed (Screenshot above-right).

This screen sharing feature is pretty good. It has a really good overall refresh rate, and picture quality is excellent. The only thing that’s missing from this feature is the fact that you cannot control the other person’s computer. There are many video chat services like iChat that allow this with no hitch, but unfortunately it looks like we will have to wait for an update.

Skype Access

Skype access is a really cool pay-as-you-go service that allows you to connect to more that 100,000 worldwide “paid” WiFi hotspots. All this means is that you can gain access to lots of public hotspots, and only pay for the amount of time you need on the internet. Seeing how most public WiFi hotspots cost you a minimum hourly or daily charge, this service seems like a really good deal.

Conclusion

So in a nutshell: improved call quality, improved UI, screen sharing (even though they did not add computer controlling within the feature), and Skype Access make this new Skype update a must have, and yes, these improvements and add-ons did improve the Skype experience a lot, and is almost guaranteed to put smiles on lots of faces.

Skype 2.8 is now currently available for free, and you can download it directly from here. Enjoy!