Disruptive Telephony

Last week I wrote some first impressions of iSkoot, a new Skype client for Blackberry, and while I still think it's a very cool idea, I don't see myself using it all that much.  Why not?  Very simply...

Battery life!

Or the lack thereof.  Yes, indeed, it all does seem to come down to batteries, and iSkoot seems to certainly consume its share of power.  Now granted, my Blackberry 7290 is an older model and for all I know could probably use a new battery, but in "normal" operation, I can charge it up and then have it run for a good 3 or 4 days before it needs a recharge.  However, start up iSkoot and I found I suddenly needed a recharge by the end of the day!

In fairness, iSkoot is not alone in this... the other Blackberry IM clients I've used, both the Windows Messenger client and also most recently the IM+ client for Skype also have this same problem.  I'm assuming it has something to do with the need to regularly use the data connection for updates to status and to update chat messages.

I can see this actually being most useful to me when I'm traveling and need to quickly reach someone from within an airport or something like that. Of course, that's also when I want the longest battery life, too!  I think I'll keep it installed on my BB, but I don't think I'll have it running except for those times when I'm somewhere and I want a quick way to do IM via Skype.

Too bad, really, because one of the fun aspects of it was that I had a very easy way to read Twitter updates and Facebook updates on my BB (since I have both Twitter and Facebook status streams piped into a Skype chat).

Ah, the joy of batteries...