Find me a reason to use Skype (I want to)

[Bobvfr]

So I have an Xbox One, 1520 a laptop and Surface Pro, my wife is also fully Skype'd up with WP, laptop and Surface 2

My daughters both live about 100 miles away, we have used Skype once so my youngest daughter could show us round her flat.

I really like most MS products, OneDrive, One Note, Office 365, Xbox music pass.

But I am struggling to find a use for Skype, my wife talks to our daughters every couple of days by phone, her sisters also live a distance away she calls them on the phone, if I contact my sisters who both live a few hundred miles away we text or once in a blue moon call.

What other uses are there for Skype, can I file/picture transfer and get rid of Whatsapp, are there other things it can do, I really want to use Skype, but can't ever get past doing a test call to see if it works.

Maybe it's me, I think I want to use it, but so far don't, so if any one can convince me please do so.

Bob

 

[Chris_Kez]

Get rid of the phone, or drastically reduce the minutes on your plan; you and your wife will use Skype a lot more
Seriously though, it sounds like you have a good use case; you just need to make an effort to use it more. Any time you think of Skype, just fire it up and call someone. It's a communication tool, after all. Cheers.

 

[lparsons21]

while I do use the phone for most calls, if I'm on the computer I'm using Skype quite a bit too. It is so handy and if the person I'm calling also has and uses Skype, we can make it a video call.

Easy and simple.


Sent from my 23-n010 using Tapatalk

 

[Bobvfr]

After some concentrated effort I think I have convinced myself of the usefulness of Skype, but it did take a lot of hours of work.

I started getting spam on whatsapp and really didn't want to use it so had another go at Skype, the main issue with all of these programs is having contacts who also use it, so I got my daughters sorted, then got the wife calling them after I got her a Kinect for her Xbox One, my boy is already a Skype user because of game playing, then the wife's sisters so we now have several people (Our closest contacts) who we can Skype, I am sure we will find more people in the future.

I get the feeling that Skype is a bit like Xbox Music in that it needs a bit of work on your part to get past some of its "issues" before it becomes a useful tool.

One thing Microsoft should consider is after someone tries Skype but no longer uses it their account should close maybe after six months so as to stop dead ends.

One good thing is secondhand Kinect's for Xbox One make superb Skype web cams hooked up to a PC

 

[michail71]

I think if Microsoft pushed it a bit more like Apple does with facetime and iChat it would be much better. On iChat it will automatically switch between mms and iChat depending on your contact's ability. They do not appear as separate apps to the user. Similarly facetime is integrated into the iPhone's dialer. Skype messaging could also use a sent/received notification along with a so and so is typing feedback like iChat.

Skype does have the potential to be much better and is truly cross platform. If Microsoft could give it a deep integration into Windows Phone it would be a HUGE selling point to the platform. Market it as Windows Phone with Skype! Right now is still feels like an out of place app on the phone.

 

[wgrs]

Skype is very well integrated into Windows phone. Just login once, and don't care afterwards. When someone calls you at skype, your phone will ring just as if it were a normal call. Quite amazing actually, and you reduce your phone costs a lot. Just be on the internet 24h a day, with a data plan.

 

[michail71]

Skype is very well integrated into Windows phone. Just login once, and don't care afterwards. When someone calls you at skype, your phone will ring just as if it were a normal call. Quite amazing actually, and you reduce your phone costs a lot. Just be on the internet 24h a day, with a data plan.

It has improved a significant amount recently. It could use a bit more deeper integration still. What surprises me is how few of my contacts seem to be on Skype. Mostly it's a discovery issue. Perhaps, MS can create an automatic account to tie in with your phone's user account and have that platform independent? But in reality, the number of people you'd want to video call with would typically be rather small.

I just set it up with my youngest son this weekend. He has an iPhone 5 but nobody he talks to has an iPhone anymore. It worked quite well.

 

[Bobvfr]

I do shift work and my wife was away this weekend, so it took me until I got hold of her phone yesterday to sort out the final few issues (We still have a big issue but we are pretending that doesn't exist for now).

The wife now has Skype working properly on her Xbox, 830 and laptop, and sent a picture to our daughters and was pleased a reply came in from one of them.

I think I have the wife working on Skype. She already liked the video call option but it is also good for picture transfer.

I like to understand how programs work and I have to say I am pleased with the results, Skype is now a good communication tool once you get rid of the app version that can't really send or receive pictures. I like the way it ties in with the People app so any contact I have on Skype is Skypable from their contact page.

Two of Skype's problems are about "usage", firstly a lot of people sign up for Skype, find they don't have anyone to talk to so give up, but that leaves them in the Skype directory and basically dead ends, the second is the offline issue, I fully understand once you put Skype on anything other than a PC you are almost always online as you want Skype to give you notifications of messages/calls but for me that isn't a problem as I am always "Online" on my phone/mobile any way.

Again it's about understanding the program before you commit to it.

Just got to convince the wife's other sister and a few others to use it now ;-)

 

[michail71]

I think you hit on the point I made. Which is contact discovery. Many people have old accounts but in their minds it's a VoIP service that you have to pay for if you want to do anything useful. So they have old accounts that remain relatively dormant. But now it's poised to be the cross platform communications app.

It seems to me it needs a method of scanning your contacts list by phone number and email to get people hooked up. I don't think it can do that now.

My kids do seem to be heavy Skype users on the PC though. Especially when gaming.

 

[Bobvfr]

After I posted yesterday I got my three kids (Grown up now) online all at once and opened a group chat, this was something I could do on my FirstClass server 20 years ago but it is still fun, so apart from one of my daughters not having sorted Skype out on her iPhone (Can't remember her password) we are pretty much Skyped up for our immediate family and now Skype starts to make a lot more sense, especially the way it integrates the Skype contacts via the people app, and the messages, calls you make and other stuff are all visible regardless of device so WP, desktop, tablet and Xbox One, pleased I put the effort in, but in some ways that is also the problem in that you need to put some effort in (Finding/persuading contacts, understanding the differences between Skype on different devices and ditching where possible the "Modern" app version) ;-)

 

[btbam91]

My brother's and I use Skype as our group chat! Great stuff as I can chat with them from my phone or my laptop!