Tango

Today in London, Nokia unveiled its first smartphones on Windows Phone (Mango) platform - Lumia 710 and Lumia 800. In general, they haven't disappointed anyone. Stylish, high quality, fast and reliable smartphones with pre-installed Mobile Office and Outlook, integrated to Exchange, SkyDrive, SharePoint, Office 365 - will surely attract business users. Of course, the price $580 (Lumia 800) - is not much different from the iPhone, but otherwise it has all chances to compete with iPhone and Android-devices. The only big cons - is that Nokia Lumia has no front camera, which means it doesn't support video chat, so important for business users. Why wasn't it installed? Nokia representative said that they simply had not enough time. But this is not the most shocking news about the video chat on Windows Phone.

One of the Skype competitors, which appeared as a result of the growing mobile video chat popularity, Tango - has released an app for windows-desktops today. Previously, it worked only on smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android. This is certainly good news for those who use Tango, but for us another thing is more interesting. The fact is that Tango's windows-interface looks exactly like iPhone. Can you imagine what we have come to? Not so long ago the first mobile devices on Windows Mobile copied desktop interface (with icons and Start menu), so that people understood how to work with them. And now developers create desktop interfaces looking like mobile apps to make them more familiar for users. Of course, it's too early to talk about the Post-PC era, but the mobile devices can play on an equal footing with desktops.

After Microsoft's Skype acquisition we started looking for its replacement as of public communication service. And, apparently, not only we, but also the investors who want to raise money on this project. From now one of the main contenders for the Skype's place - is Tango. It has just closed $42 million in its Series B round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, notably the first outside investors in Skype. Tango launched 18 months ago and already has 18 million users. Every 2 weeks it adds a million. Until now, Tango was a mobile service. It allowed to make video calls on iPhone, iPad and Android (smartphones and tablets). But now it introduced the Windows app, and soon plans to create the Mac-client. So how is Tango different from Skype?