Over at MWC, in the city blessed with the best footballing side since Ian Bishop and Kevin Keen lined up in the West Ham midfield in the early 90s, Pocket-lint caught up with our pals from Skype who were keen to show off the brand spanking new Windows Phone 7 app for the VoIP platform.

Our quick take

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Rather than being deeply integrated into the Mango OS, Skype (and presumably Microsoft) has decided at this point to keep the app its own entity and have it available as an option from the Marketplace rather than hard-baking it into the mobile platform - although we got the impression during our briefing that deeper love was going to come down the line for the two Microsoft services.

For now though, it's a pretty swanky app - much more fancy looking than Skype apps on Android and iOS. You'll be able to make free audio and video calls to your Skype contacts over 3G, 4G or WiFi; make affordable calls to landlines and mobiles using Skype Credit, create and hold one-to-one and group chats and update your profile and account information, among others features.

It has a lovely Metro tile UI feel to it with awesome graphics and images on display and it's easy enough to do all the tasks that you've come to expect from Skype including instant messages.

You'll also have access to your contacts, a dial-pad, a list of recent calls or chats and be able to search your friends in an interface similar to how the phone hub looks already.

You can download the beta version of the Skype for Windows Phone app for free now. You will need to have a smartphone running Windows Phone 7.5 and one of the following handsets:

·         Nokia Lumia 710

·         Nokia Lumia 800

·         HTC Titan

·         HTC Radar

·         Samsung Focus S

·         Samsung Focus Flash

We're told it will arrive on more devices soon.