Can You Skype on Kindle Fire?

Dec 282011

As you probably know, Amazon has made a number of sacrifices to make the price of its Kindle Fire tablet very competitive. This includes smaller screen, lack of navigation and volume buttons, no camera, no microphone, Bluetooth, GPS, etc. You can read more about this in my recent post about the Missing Features of the Kindle Fire, however, I thought there might be a slight chance for voice telephony when using a set of headphones with a microphone (such as those of the iPhone or an Android smartphone), but nobody got Skype to work with it yet, and who knows when and whether it will ever work(see Amazon Kindle Customer Forum Discussion about this)

In addition to the Amazon discussion forums, an article about adding the microphone functionality to the Kindle fire via a headset on Liliputing.com has several comments of users who tried to get Skype to work this way and so far it failed for everyone.

Therefore, the answer is no, at least not for now until Skype is customized for the Kindle Fire. As of January 5, 2012, Skype app is not available for the Kindle Fire on the Amazon App market. As you can see from the picture, search for Skype returned some messaging apps, Netflix and Pandora and some other irrelevant apps.

Skype app for the Kindle Fire is not available on Amazon app market

Skype doesn’t even seem to work (yet) on the Nook Tablet, the main competitor of the Kindle Fire. Even though the Nook Tablet has a built-in microphone (no camera though), Skype still doesn’t recognize it, so it currently can only be used for text chat.

One would hope that there are other ways of connecting a mic and a camera to a tablet, but lack of any ports and lack of Bluetooth is another obstacle that takes flexibility and extra options out of the equation for the Kindle Fire.

http://www.cashforsmartphones.com/ Sell Electronics

I thought you can.
Andy68man

According to
http://www.xda-developers.com/ the Kindle Fire *does* have a bluetooth chip in it. It’s just not active and they haven’t yet been able to find out how it’s wired up. Once they do hopefully they’ll be able to activate it in a new Android build and we can then connect up bluetooth headsets and keyboards.
- http://deputycio.com Zarko
  
  Thank you for your comment. I found some similar posts about a Bluetooth chip found in the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet teardowns (disassembly snoops done by curious people like us), but the question is not only how they are wired, but whether they are wired at all.
  
  Using standard bundled WiFi/Bluetooth chips produced in series of many millions could have been cheaper than ordering custom made chips without these modules. As much as I’d like to see this work, I’m afraid that’s still more a wish than a possibility. I hope I’m wrong.
  
  For years I’ve been reading similar stories about an FM radio chip being present on the iPhone 3GS and higher models, but there’s still no working built-in FM radio receiver on any iPhone. This was one of the reasons I ditched the iPhone as stated in my last year’s post http://deputycio.com/427/bye-iphone-hello-evo.
  
  If the Bluetooth chip on either Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet IS wired, then this could have a much better outcome than the FM radio on iPhone because Android phones and tablets are much more mod-friendly.
  
  If you (or anybody else) learn anything more about this please don’t hesitate to comment. Thanks!
crazycatlady

i got skype to work, with earbuds with a microphone..
sammydiver

Can you use Skype in the Kindle Fire HD?