Only a month after it was supposed to be released, Skype for the iPad tablet has arrived inside the App Store.  It even continued its difficult journey by launching this morning, disappearing and then re-emerging a few hours later!  Now the VoIP app is finally here, has it been worth the wait?  To find out, I enlisted a friend and we got down to some serious FaceTime Skype video calling!

After signing in, the app loads a two-panel main screen which looks very similar to iOS’s email client; displaying contacts and history on the left and big icons for all your contacts on the right.  As usual, they’ve got a green tick by their name if they’re online.

Along the top of the screen are a few option buttons for making a call and adding or searching for a contact, plus if you tap your profile picture you get all your status, profile and Skype settings.  If you fancy changing your profile picture, you can even do so using the iPad 2′s camera!  Tapping a contact shows all their profile information along with the option to call, video chat or send them a message.  If you’ve used the desktop edition of Skype, all the colors, sounds and basic functions have been replicated here.

Tapping out messages was as natural and normal as using Skype on the desktop, and yet another demonstration of the iPad’s virtual keyboard’s prowess.  The scrolling was a bit of a pain, as it didn’t always auto-scroll to the latest message, but provided you didn’t scan through old content it wasn’t annoying.  The app continued to monitor for messages whilst active in the multi-tasking tray, and notifications appeared promptly when the iPad was locked.

But the real attraction here is the option to video call with your friends, so I grabbed someone who was online and forced them into a video call.  Connection through Skype’s system using Wi-Fi didn’t take a moment, and a call window taking up almost half the screen appeared, along with a small thumbnail of the video image you were sending.  The video can be made fullscreen if you’d like too.

The person I called said the audio quality was great, but the video image was a little pixelated – and the same could be said for his Sony Vaio webcam – and on my end, the audio was crisp and clear, although the volume level was a little low even when maxed out.  The app worked fine though, and over the course of a couple of five-minute calls while running two chat windows, it remained stable and had no issues as I chopped and changed between them.

One thing which should be noted is that due to the location of the iPad 2′s front-facing cam, unless you want to show one half of your face during a video chat, the iPad has to be in portrait position; and even then it has to be ‘flat’ in front of you, otherwise you cut off the bottom of your face instead.  Continually fiddling about with the orientation of the tablet was annoying, especially for the person being called.  Sitting down with the iPad supported in a stand (I used my old PadStand, which fits the iPad 2 perfectly) was a massive improvement.

I’ve only tested it out over Wi-Fi, but then the 3G support for the iPhone Skype app is the one part I don’t find very reliable.  Otherwise, this long-absent version of the popular VoIP service has been well worth the wait.  Skype for iPad is a free app, and can be downloaded here.