PSP Skype Isn’t Lag Free

With the official announcement of Skype for the PlayStation Portable at CES last week, Engadget got to try out the new service for themselves. They reported that the audio quality “was pretty decent — certainly comparable to what we experience when using Skype either on a PC or on the receiving end of one.” That’s certainly good news, but, naturally, there’s always a caveat. There “is a bit of lag time in the audio transmission, less than a second but enough to be noticeable.”

So if you were planning on canceling your phone service so that Skype PSP could take its place, you might want to hold onto your phone for a little while longer. Maybe the lag will be ironed out by the time the new PSP firmware with Skype rolls out later this month, or maybe it’ll be something you don’t notice. We’ll have to see for ourselves when Skype is released, but it sounds like this might not be the best alternative to picking up a real phone.

At least it’s free.