Thanks to 3mobilebuzz, we’ve had two 3 SkypePhones here for a while now, and we want to list some of the nice features of the device.

What is it?

It’s primarily a mobile phone, but it comes with a Skype client built in, and 3 offer the phone with free use of Skype (subject to a fair use limit of 4,000 minutes and 10,000 Skype chats within a 30 day period). It has a 2 megapixel camera (no flash), Bluetooth, and ships with a USB cable, a CD-ROM with software and an electronic manual (there’s a real paper manual in the box too), a charger, and a wired headset.

How Much is it?

Firstly, the 3 SkypePhone costs either £49.99 on PAYG (Pay As You Go), or is free with an 18 month, £12 per month contract, and you can port your number from your current mobile to 3 if you want. To keep the Skype element working, you either need to keep the phone under contract, or topup the PAYG version with £10 every 30 days.

How Big is it?

The phone is 100 x 44 x 13.6mm and weighs 86g, which makes it very pocketable, and easy to use. Some people find the phone a little too small, although we had no problems.

What’s the Call Quality like?

Others have claimed that the call quality is as good as a normal mobile phone - our testing, with both phones with 2 bars of signal, about 100 miles apart, was not so good, with the other tester claiming it was worse than the quality of being on the receiving end of a SkypeOUT call. We will continue to test these phones, to see if it was an isolated incident.

What’s SkypeCHAT like?

Very good. If you are sitting there testing the service, you can see it takes a little while for the chat message to get through, and often the phone beeps to notify you of an incoming chat a little while before the chat gets displayed, but it works well, even coping with multiple chats happening at the same time. At the moment, this is a unique feature of the 3 SkypePhone - the existing Skype clients for the 3 X-Series devices do not support SkypeCHAT, although 3 have indicated this should become available during 2008.

Other nice features…

Any missed Skype calls get sent to your 3 voicemail box (which is free to access). This means you only have 1 place to check for messages.

Internet access can be bought for just £5 per 30 days. If you have the PAYG version, you can use half of your £10 topup credit for Internet access. We found this easy to achieve via the My3 menu item, and had no problems in downloading a selection of Java applications afterwards - Google Maps, Mobile GMaps, Opera Mini all downloaded and worked fine, and gave us the ability to use up some of the (fair use limited to 1Gb) Internet access.

One point to note - the new location feature within Google Maps which we covered here does not currently work on the 3 SkypePhone, which is a real shame.

Also of note is that the 3 SkypePhone forums are available to access directly on your 3 SkypePhone via http://3skype.mobi

As we mentioned before, you can connect your 3 SkypePhone to your laptop, and we found no problems in doing this, having already installed the Modem software to manage the connection. Whether this is strictly within the T&Cs is still an outstanding question, but it worked fine, and maybe a suitable option for people who just occasionally need to access the Internet whilst away from home / work / WiFi coverage.

There’s a button on the side of the phone that acts as a task switcher, which is useful to switch between various running applications, Skype, and the main standby screen.

Downsides…

No SkypeIN - we can understand not including SkypeOUT (as that reduces the potential revenue for 3), but SkypeIN is a key feature for many people who are the target market for a 3 SkypePhone. 3 have, however, hinted that this is likely to be available during 2008.

The Skype client is a little limiting - eg although you can create a Skype account direct on the device, you cannot edit your profile and set a Full Name for the account. Although we used a PC Skype client to update our two test accounts, it took a fair bit of effort to update the displayed name (you can edit the contact name in the addressbook, but this does not update the Skype client page, which is a shame).

The 3 SkypePhone’s Bluetooth doesn’t seem to be fully supported by some devices - eg Garmin / Parrot Bluetooth Handsfree devices could be made to pair, but could not synchronise the phonebook. This maybe a limitation within the Parrot software, but something 3 should be working with Parrot to fix (Garmin use Parrot software, so any fix should eventually be available via Garmin too).

The USB port is used for charging and for the wired headset, so you can’t charge the phone whilst in the car (unless, like us, you use a Bluetooth Handsfree).

As a brand new device, they are currently few accessories for it - no desktop cradles, no dedicated phone holders (Brodit springs to mind), few cases - these should come, and we hope that 3 encourage the main players (Brodit, Krusell etc.) to support the device, and then 3 promote these products via their own website.

Other points to note

As long term Nokia users, we are used to firmware updates, which were previously performed at Nokia Service Centres, but more recently the phones have supported firmware upgrades via the PC. The 3 SkypePhone supports updates to the Skype client, but not to the phone itself. It’s currently unclear if 3 will ever update the base phone firmware (they may not need to of course), and if so how this would be achieved.

We occasionally got “Incoming Skype Call” and at other times the name of the calling party. With some of our earlier comments, it does feel a little like the Skype client needs an upgrade in the New Year to address some of these concerns.

Overall opinion

A definite hit for 3, and for Skype. These phones should be, and are, selling like hotcakes, and at the price of £50 provide a feature rich mobile phone even if you ignore the Skype facilities. With SkypeIN support, and an update to the Skype client to deal with a few minor issues, this will continue to be a big seller.