Saturday, September 10, 2011

Skype video calling on HeroTab C8 with Android 2.3

Install and configure Skype:
  1. Go to Android Market and install Skype.
  2. View the notifications and watch as it progresses through download and installation.  If you don't see it finish installing, you won't see it in the applications list, and you won't be able to download it again from the market--the install button won't appear anymore.  If that happens, you'll need to do a Factory Reset (goodbye to your apps, settings, and other data).
  3. Start Skype and sign-in.
  4. Go to Settings on the menu and enable video calling.
Warning:  Don't try to uninstall Skype, because you'll likely end up with the situation described in #2.  [Also saw other references to this upon some googling, as in:  you'll need to do a hard reset to re-install Skype.]


Initiating a call:
  1. Select a contact and start a "Skype call".  This is very important:  do not try to start a video call from the tablet, because the app will crash and you'll get this error:  "The application Skype (process com.skype.raider) has stopped unexpectedly.  Please try again."
  2. Your contact should click on the "answer with video" button.
  3. Tap your tablet and tap on the videocam icon.
  4. Tap on the "Back camera" option (there's only one camera on the HeroTab, and it's actually front-facing).
  5. The screen will show your video and then your contact's video in a little window.  Double-tap on the little window to switch them.  Your contact's video will now take up the whole screen in landscape mode (as far as I can tell, it can't go portrait mode).

Receiving a call:
  1. Have your contact start a "Call" (not a "Video call").  If they start a video call, the Skype app on the tablet will turn around and call the caller instead.  If they accept that video call, then they'll see your video.  But you'll only see your own video.  Meh.  :-(
  2. When the call arrives on the tablet, click on the green "Video" button.
  3. The caller will see a message saying they'll need to turn on their video.  The caller need to click on the "My video" cam icon.
  4. The caller's video window now appears on the tablet.  Double-tap on it to make it the full-screen window.

This information worked for me today (2011-Sep-10).  It will likely change for later versions of either the Skype app or Android.

1 comment:

  1. Since writing this post I have found a Skype mod by theos0o from this SlateDroid thread. So far it has worked well for me, and we can initiate video calls without having to go through all the steps above.

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