The forgotten Skype phones

Tributes are pouring in for Skype, and deservedly so, after Microsoft said it will close the groundbreaking service. Skype’s best days are far behind it, but it was hugely important. It was one of the foundational apps of the early internet era, instrumental in showing people how much better even a basic function like phone calls could be when done over the internet.

To be honest, I don’t have a huge amount of nostalgia for Skype. It wasn’t something I used much. But there was one thing I do remember fondly: physical Skype phones.

In 2006, a few companies started releasing hardware that could directly access Skype. We had the SMC one, and there were others from Netgear and Linksys. They were phones, physical handsets, that connected to Wi-Fi and made Skype calls — no computer needed.

This might not sound remarkable, but remember, the iPhone was still a year off. Skype was, at that point, a strictly computer-based app. Every call had to be made in front of a desktop or laptop. And back then, computers were harder to use, components like microphones weren’t as good, everything was less reliable, and tech literacy was far, far lower.

If you think it’s annoying watching a tech-illiterate colleague struggle with Zoom, okay, multiply that by a thousand and you have a vague idea of what it was like troubleshooting an older relative’s Skype calls in the early 2000s.

Having this standalone device that made Skype calls was a godsend. It made it so easy and accessible that we immediately bought a couple so my mom could call family without having to mess around with her computer. (Or, to be more accurate, without having to call me to mess around with her computer.)

But it fascinated me far beyond the functional level. There was something strangely magical about the device.

This might sound mildly insane considering how unremarkable it looks and how basic the functionality is. It looks like a phone. Phones have looked like that for years, decades even. And it makes phone calls, they just happen to be over Skype.

So the SMC Skype phone is a phone-shaped phone. Where’s the magic in that?

It stood out because it took something from the computer and put it in a decidedly non-computer form. The creators of Skype had previously created the peer-to-peer music downloading file sharing service Kazaa, and Skype was based on the same infrastructure. Phone calls sound simple enough, but the tech behind Skype sounded too complex and demanding to fit into such a small and simple device.

Again, the iPhone hadn’t even been unveiled yet. The idea that we’d be holding computers in our hands was still science fiction at this point. Okay, this wasn’t exactly a full computer. But it took something that you thought only a computer could do and made it small, light and accessible. It turned an application into an appliance.

(Fun bit of trivia for you: The Linksys Skype phones were branded… iPhone! Cisco had a whole line of iPhones dating way back to 1998. I remember the confusion in the Apple rumor community because iPhone seemed a logical name for the yet-to-be-unveiled Apple phone, but they surely won't use that name, Cisco owns it! And then Jobs unveiled it as the iPhone anyway. There was a brief trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple before the companies agreed to share the name.)

Truth be told, when it came to actually using the SMC Skype phone...it kinda sucked. It was pretty good when it worked — it just didn’t work very often. It was a tricky, finicky device for what was, at that point, a tricky, finicky service.

And even if it was an amazing phone, it wouldn’t have mattered. A year later, the iPhone was released. By 2009, there was an official Skype app for iOS and Android. A standalone Skype phone was never going to be better than a smartphone with a Skype; this is one gadget that the smartphone was always going to swallow.

But I’ll always remember the SMC Skype phone as a forgotten little landmark. It took a digital stalwart and gave it a physical presence. It made Skype more than an app; gave it literal weight, made it feel real. There’s magic in that.