Tango’s CTO Indicates Skype For WP7 Is Months Off…And Other Leaks

The CTO of Tango (the cross platform Skype competitor) did an interview with Forbes and there’s some potentially juicy stuff here. First, they claim that Tango will be available before Skype is for Windows Phones. Now we know the Radar will come to T-Mobile on November 2 and that includes Tango. But they also note that "Tango is coming to Windows Phones on November 7” so that’s likely the date it will be available in the Marketplace. And it turns out that MS gave Tango help with their app and they are even going to be able to leverage hardware acceleration to make the app run smoother. They note that the two companies worked together on the app which means that Microsoft was actually actively working with a competitor which is nice to see actually. Lets get to more juicy stuff though:

“I think Microsoft sees video-calling as a killer app for holiday season sales [of Windows Phone devices],” said Tango founder and Chief Technology Officer Eric Setton in an interview. “And no other video-calling company besides us will be out on Windows Phone [before the holidays].”

So not only is Tango out but Skype is not out by the holidays. The Forbes article notes that the Skype acquisition was just approved but I think they are entirely overlooking the pre-acquisition news. At Mix they stated that Skype was coming to WP7 late fall and a 2011 release for Skype was confirmed recently. So we’re clear, this is a Skype app and not Skype being integrated into the OS which is months off.

OK let’s get back to the leaks: “Samsung will have Mango phones available in November on AT&T”. Confirmed? OK because no dates are public so maybe Tango has some deals in the works.

Now I still don’t believe that Tango will have months as the sole video-calling app as they suggest. The real question is how much of what was said in the interview is based on knowledge and how much is just speculation.