Only weeks after saying Skype "worked well" on the Lumia 610, Nokia Hong Kong announced today that it has decided to remove Skype from the Windows Phone Marketplace on the device, because the app's experience doesn't live up to the company's expectations. The likeliest culprit seems to be the 256MB of RAM inside the Lumia 610 — the Skype app listing says it requires 512MB of memory. Nokia Hong Kong released an official statement on the matter, as reported by welovewp.hk:

Nokia attaches great importance to the launch of products and services to bring the user experience, so even if the Skype Windows Phone version on the Nokia Lumia 610 does, but after intensive testing, we found the user experience does not guarantee to Nokia and Skype the expected level. Therefore, we do not recommend users to use Skype on the Nokia Lumia 610. Nokia Lumia 610 users in the Windows Phone Marketplace "will not be able to download Skype, Windows Phone version. Skype, Windows Phone version will continue to open to other users to download.

We'd heard before that Skype wouldn't be supported on lower-memory devices, and as then the only solution seems to be for Skype to release a version of the app that doesn't require so much memory. Given that Skype is obviously a flagship product for Microsoft after its $8.5 billion acquisition last year, we wouldn't be surprised if that's already in the works. The app is still available to other Windows Phone users, but Nokia's statement makes it hard to imagine Skype will come back to the Lumia 610 until it can support devices with lower memory.

We've reached out for comment, and will update when we hear back.