Greetings from the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. On Thursday morning, I spoke at a CES press conference about Skype, sharing our vision of the future and new additions to our product range.

One of our major priorities is to let you take Skype with you wherever you go, so you can use Skype anytime, anywhere, on any device or network. To make this possible, we’ve been hard at work developing versions of Skype which will run on your mobile devices, in addition to continuing to innovate with our desktop products. At CES, we announced two fantastic new additions to the Skype software line-up.

Android

First, a new lite version of Skype is now available for download on Android-powered mobile devices. The lite version of Skype is a ‘thin client’ which lets you chat with or call other Skype users, as well as call landlines and mobiles around the world. You’ll now be able to run it on Android-powered mobile devices, beginning with the T-Mobile G1, as well as more than 100 other Java-enabled mobile phones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG. For the first time, it is also now available for US users.

You can download the lite version of Skype for Android direct from the Android Market on your Android device. Following our announcement last month of a new Skype for Windows Mobile 2.5 beta, Skype is now available on nearly 200 mobile devices.

For those of you reading this in an RSS reader, you can watch the video here. You can also grab the embed code if you want to use this video in your own blog.

MIDs

We are also bringing Skype to entirely new categories of devices. Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) are powerful, adding extra processing power and memory, larger screens and improved battery life, enabling us to bring the full functionality of Skype to them. For these devices, Skype now offers free voice and video calling from the palm of your hand. We’re rolling out the first version of Skype for MIDs based on the Intel Atom processor and Moblin-based Linux OS.

ABI Research expects 86 million Linux-powered MIDs to ship by 2013, so this is a big opportunity for Skype, and we’re working in partnership with Intel to make Skype the communication tool of choice on MIDs. Head over to the Garage blog to see some more information and download the Skype for MIDs Beta.

Together, these two products represent a big step towards our goal of making Skype available everywhere. Now, following the recent updates to Skype for Windows Mobile last month and the recent introductions of the 3 Skypephone S2 and INQ1 mobile handsets, we’re making progress towards our goal. Over the next 6-12 months, you’ll see Skype become available on an even wider range of mobile handsets and platforms.

Mac

On the desktop front, we released Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac earlier this week and introduced two new core features – Skype Access and screen sharing. I am passionate Mac user myself, and I’ve heard your feedback about wanting to see some new features launch first on Mac. I hope you enjoy them. I’ve been using the screen sharing to share YouTube Christmas carols with my 4 year old daughter Madison, and she has enjoyed them despite my poor singing.

Windows

I’m also excited that, in a few weeks time, a final version of Skype 4.0 for Windows will be made available. As part of the all new Skype, our engineers have developed something we are calling ‘super wideband audio,’ which is available today. This new speech codec produces incredible sound quality – even when bandwidth is low. You just need to download the updated beta.

If you use a sound card and headset or speakers which support sampling above 16khz, you’ll already get the full ‘super wideband audio’ experience. While there are a number of headsets and devices that already support this, we will be announcing a number of ‘super wideband audio’ certified devices over the coming months.

As you can see, we’ve been busy getting these products ready for you. And there will be plenty of other great things ahead from Skype in 2009. Stay tuned