Skype to go portable on thumb drive
It isn't quite a phone, but it soon will be possible to take a Skype client with you and plug it into a barenaked PC equipped with a USB port. U3, the Silicon Valley start-up launched by Palm veterans earlier this year, says it will support a portable Skype on its flash-based platform from this fall.
U3 already supports a portable email client and a bunch of encryption, caching and backup software titles. The Mozilla Foundation has pledged to make Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird conform to the U3 specification. Yesterday, in addition to Skype, U3 also announced support for ICQ. It's hard to underestimate the ubiquity of the internet cafe in urban Asia, the most promising market for U3. As we've noted before, when Intel talks about 'mobility' it means lugging around several pounds of short-life hardware, cables, power supplies and dongles with you. But the most mobile technology of all is no technology at all.
