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This post officially starts a new service: electronMobile’s Weekly Mobile News.

Every Saturday we will be offering you a quick glance to the most important events in the mobile world from the previous week. We will be focusing on news about the iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms, as well as other systems (with a slight preference for the iPhone, why not saying it!). There will be news for developers, decision makers and everyone interested in mobile technologies, including links to more expanded coverage.

Having said that, this is Weekly Mobile News #1:

1) Skype for the iPhone Released

This is the most important news of the previous mobile week. The Skype iPhone application was probably the most wanted one ever in the App Store, and it has reached the top of all download charts in just… a couple of minutes. Literally. The release of the application was suggested by several rumors over the last weeks, and then confirmed on Monday by CNET (relayed later by TUAW and others). As we write these lines, Skype is breaking all download records all over the world, and on Tuesday (April 2nd) it was reportedly being downloaded once every six seconds, with a staggering one million download count in just two days.

It was somewhat unfortunate that the Skype team would take so long to release an official application for their service, which translated in a serious advantage for outsiders like Fring (released last October) and Truphone (released last January) to provide similar services in the meantime.

There were also reports about crashes, but these are apparently only happening on “jailbroken” devices, which prompted Skype to add the following disclaimer on the App Store:

Please note: Skype is not responsible for errors orcrashes which result from changes to the underlying iPhone OS.

In any case, Skype on the App Store is really interesting news in many fronts. Mobile Voice over IP (VoIP) is a hot topic, not really because of the technological problems (which have been solved long ago), but because of the political and economical turmoil that it represents: needless to say, bypassing cellular networks is not a good idea… particularly from the Telco’s point of view.

But VoIP clearly represents a big win for consumers, without any doubt. There is an organizational and business clash happening right now, completely foreseen (everybody knew this would happen some day), and given the current economic crisis, the pressure on the Telco’s is likely to increase day by day. Pressure groups are even advocating to unblock the usage of VoIP over 3G networks, something that, it seems, is possible to do with the iPhone OS 3.0 Beta. Will this “feature” be unlocked as soon as the iPhone OS 3.0 is released in June?

Right now, the rumor mill swings to the side of some video chat capabilities to be available in the next generation iPhone, though it seems that current data networks would not be able to handle the massive amounts of data required for such a feature (and we at electronMobile we believe that’s true). Maybe in 2010?

2) iPhone 3.0 Beta 2 Released

In the iPhone software development world, it seems that Apple has activated the turbo boosters in its development team. Shortly after presenting the iPhone SDK 3.0 Beta on March 17th, Beta 2 was released last Tuesday with a huge amount of new capabilities. Given the strict NDA covering the current Beta SDK, we will not provide any details, but suffice to say that the platform looks really promising, as a welcome update, with many new features, some of which, we believe, should have been available already in version 2.0.

In any case, here is a quick roundup of some relevant news for iPhone software developers, both in versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the iPhone OS:

Wayne Pan reports a huge increase in the performance of JavaScript on the iPhone OS 3.0 (via Mobile Orchard)
Jeff LaMarche (@jeff_lamarche on Twitter) wrote an extremely interesting “WWDC First Time Guide” in his blog. Jeff is the co-author of “Beginning iPhone Development”, a great book about the iPhone SDK 2.0, which is currently being updated with the latest changes on the iPhone OS 3.0.
Fraser Speirs, a prominent figure in Cocoa programming circles, has posted an interesting article about the integration of Xcode, Git and the LLVM/Clang Static Analyzer using post-commit hooks. If you have not understood a word about what’s written in the previous sentence, that’s OK!
It seems that the Apple Xcode team is hiring! We wonder what are they preparing under the hood…? (via @MichaelJurewitz)
Apple has announced the Apple Design Awards 2009! Developers can send their ideas for submission, and the ceremony will be held during WWDC. electronMobile will be there and will report LIVE from the very center of the Apple galaxy!

Have a nice mobile week! As usual, follow us on Twitter: @electronMobile!