Skype coming to iPhone

How’s this for a game-changer: Skype, that free Internet phone service we all enjoy, is coming to the iPhone. You can already use Skype on Google-powered phones, Nokia phones and Windows Mobile phones, but on Tuesday, you’ll be able to download a Skype app to your iPhone and make free VoIP calls to other Skype users. If you want to call a landline or cell, that works too: Skype provides cheap calls to ”traditional” phone numbers too.

Skype will only work with Wi-Fi, so it’s not like you’ll be able to make free calls from anywhere. Regardless, if you’re hanging out at home or in a café with an open wireless network, phone calls are free to other Skypers. Not perfect, but not bad at all. If I were in a business that relied on charging people to make cell phone calls, I’d be very, very nervous right about now.

Although I have gone on record as preferring the Jitterbug to the iPhone, but this news changes even my mind. I’m declaring it here: I am giving in to technological hipness and going to purchase an iPhone. So I’m on board and Attack of the Show host and iPhone user Kevin Pereira has been moved to declare “This will be a GAME CHANGER!” on his twitter. Perhaps you disagree? Do you think Skype will prove popular enough to be a widely useful way to make calls? Or does adding another layer of complexity to making a phone call doom iPhone Skype to the ghetto of tech weenies and “early adopters?”