[jsnell]

Ah, right. I forgot about the silly American idea of the receiver paying for a call instead of the caller. My experience with Skype is that it's very rarely used for making phone calls to normal numbers, but used all the time for long-distance / international calls with somebody expecting that call. There's very little benefit to using a mobile terminal in a case like that.

My point about battery life might not have been well made. It's not that games are an alternative to Skype, but that it's just absurdly power-hungry. Even more so than the apps that you'd expect to be the real hogs. My Nexus S usually goes 2-3 days between charges. If I leave Skype running in the background, it's drained in less than 8 hours.

Controlling that largest VoIP network in the world might well be valuable to MS. But to date I just haven't seen any evidence of it mixing well with mobile phones.