The 3 Skypephone: a review

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Sunday, 02 December 2007

Page 1 of 2 ! If you’ve ever wished Skype could truly be mobile, on a dedicated mobile Skype phone that worked just like Skype on your desktop, the 3 Skypephone has arrived to make your wishes come true! Skype, the world’s most popular Internet phone call software, having made online calling as simple and reliable as text messaging, has already gone mobile some time ago. Mobile clients for Windows Mobile, Symbian and other platforms, along with cordless Wi-Fi and DECT phones for use in the home, office or at hotspots for Wi-Fi models, has been possible not just with Skype, but a range of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, or Internet phone) programs. But Skype is the most popular of them all, with more than 200m users, and in all the time it has faithfully rendered us all the service of free phone calls between Skype users and very inexpensive calls, in most cases, to real phones, there has only been one major outage, an excellent record compared with traditional phone companies over the years. When Skype and global telecommunications company Three (3) started working together on offering Skype through 3’s X-Series mobile broadband new service to consumers, a plan was hatched to create a co-branded 3 Skypephone offering users the ability to call anyone on Skype free of charge around the world, while also being able to make cheap phone calls to real landline and mobile phones. The phone is surprisingly small and slim, weighs only 86g and comes in white, with blue or pink highlights, or in black. It has a large Skype button which activates the Skype client, showing you all your contacts and their online or offline status. The phone’s keypad could be a bit larger, and texting long messages or lots of short messages over an extended period of time will tire your hands, but then that’s true of most keypad phones today. Pressing the Skype button when a contact is highlighted will call them by default, although this action can be change to ‘start chat’ instead, depending on the user’s preference. Talking on the 3 Skypephone produced calls of the same kind of quality I received from actual mobile phone calls. Occasionally I heard a slight warble in the voice of the person I was talking to, but the service worked as advertised. Actually getting connected proved more troublesome, when setting up the phone for the first time and activating it, you are advised to wait up to 24 hours for your profile to become activated. I did this and after 36 hours I rang customer support who looked into my account and discovered something still hadn’t been switched on at their end. They fixed that and within 5 minutes I was able to connect to my regular Skype account to start texting and calling people, and receive calls, with great success! So, what's inside the 3 Skypephone, and who makes it? Please read onto page 2 to continue! << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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