Microsoft, or rather the Skype division inside Microsoft, has announced that the Skype client is now officially available on Blackberry"s BB10 OS. The app is available only on the Q10 devices that haven"t properly launched yet, so few people will actually have access to it.
However that seems to be for the best; TechCrunch reports that the app is a real pain when it comes to user experience. Although officially called a beta, even that falls far below any of today"s standards and expectation. Users will indeed be able to send/receive messages and calls, but the good part stops there.
Because this is only a port of the Android app, it runs in a virtualized environment atop BB10, and is plagued by serious problems. The app is extremely slow and laggy with keypresses taking a long time to register. Notifications are a complete mess going off at random without any reason. The app itself doesn"t integrate with the Blackberry OS hence doesn"t respect system wide sound settings. And the list could probably go on.
Hopefully for Blackberry users the app will be updated soon and start being useful, but so far that"s doesn"t seem to be the case if the first glance reports are to be believed.
This is just further proof that Blackberry"s strategy of porting Android apps to bolster their offerings will only result in an impressive app count, but little else.
Source: TechCrunch | Images via TechCrunch