All the stuff that I usually have with me

Clockwise (from top left): wallet, iPhone 3Gs, guitar pick, Citizen Nighthawk watch, fountain pen, external microphone (enhanced video/audio recording with the iPhone), a Yahoo!-branded Jawbone Bluetooth headset, keys, eyeglass cloth, Buck knife, change, small Leatherman flashlight, another key, and my trusty Levenger pocket briefcase.

The new version (2.1.1) makes no mention of the power issue in the release notes, but it does mention these new features:

• You can now disable IM alerts
• The dialpad is now more responsive (ed: I wonder what that means?)
• The behavior of the volume, when Skype interacts with other apps, is better
• When your status is set to Do Not Disturb, notifications are not shown when the app is running in the background.

I suppose its possible that these may have addressed the power consumption issue, and a brief (30 minute) test this morning did not show any unusual power drop while running Skype in the background, so it’s possible this may have been fixed as a bug.

I plan on running Skype in the background today, so I can give you a full update later.

I think it’s worth pointing out that Skype is not really focusing on its iPhone app. If you visit the main Skype site (link above) and click the “Go mobile” link, you’re treated to a page discussing Verizon, Blackberry, and Android 3G. There’s a small button at the bottom of the page for “Other mobile solutions” that takes you to a page where you can choose Skype for either iPhone or Symbian. In addition, Skype has been extremely slow (compared to other app developers) in responding to iOS updates and hardware changes such as the new iPhone 4.

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

But, to return to the original discussion—I use my iPhone so rarely as a phone, the carrier is nearly irrelevant. I use Skype on my MacBook Pro more often for voice communication than I use my iPhone. Unlike Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, I don’t have companies tossing various models of Android at me to let me try them for a few weeks, so I can’t compare. But the essence of my argument is that, for many “mobile professionals,” the telephone carrier is almost irrelevant. Both AT&T and Verizon are “good enough,” and we should be making our purchase decisions on other factors, such as the battery life (which seems to stink on every so-called “smart phone”).

Louis Gray agrees when he points out that the call quality isn’t what moved him from iPhone:

Yes, AT&T has been dramatically underdelivering in terms of quality and functionality, but this did not drive me away from Apple as much as the lack of choice did.

If you are a person who spends most of his or her time on the phone, then call quality should be a determining factor in which phone you purchase. For the rest of us, the user experience, battery life, underlying platform, and so-called “ecosystem” of applications and support are vastly more important than which carrier we choose.