As many of you that read one of the other blogs will know, I have owned my 3 Skypephone for a good few months now. I loved the idea of being able to use Skype on a mobile phone without resorting to some cobbled together solution involving extra equipment nor a computer. I blathered about it being a smart and useable handset that turned out to be suprisingly cheap over at Blatantly Random, but now that I have lived with it for a few months, the honeymoon period is over.
In a nutshell, it’s a normal candybar mobile phone. It’s cheap, it’s functional for calls, texts and mms, and it has hefty Skype integration, allowing you to call people from your phonebook on either their mobile, housephone or their Skype client if it’s accepting calls. The important part is that 3 UK offer this Skype functionality for no extra charge, so long as you are either on a contract or on a prepay solution. It does the jobs as described, but it does have it’s faults….
The most obvious problem is cosmetic. Rubbery latex covers most of the handset which, despite being a bit odd in terms of coating, is lovely to touch. Sadly, the coating for the removable back cover has mostly peeled off. Weirdly it is just this back cover that has the problem, since the rest of the phone seems to look ok.
Turning to the software side, I do have to wonder what the manufacturers were thinking when they allowed the handset to have a booting time of near to a minute. Most other phones I have seen use half the time or less to become ready, but not in this case. Heck, the 3 logo appears and stays on screen for a good 40 seconds before the other logos flash up for a short time. Skype, the main reason for having the handset at all in the first place does have it’s quirks too. Such as the long delays between updates of it’s contact list in comparison to the PC. And the fact that you can’t just block everyone bar your contact list from Skyping you. This annoys me, as spammers are creating 50 person conference calls, so once I close the initial spam message I also end up getting a ton of “Bob has left the conference call” messages to boot. Not good at all.
The same laziness of logic also features in the design of the phone itself. Yes, it is vaguely cool to have video calling. What isn’t is the fact that there is only one camera on the handset on the back, and therefore you cannot film yourself and see the screen without employing the use of a mirror. It’s almost as if someone thought that with the software they have thrown onto the handset, since it included video telephony, why not actually use it? Surely someone in testing would have thought it was a bad idea to have that.
The very fact that I have Skype on the handset does kinda outweigh most of these issues. Granted, Skype is in it’s slightly butchered form in order to keep 3’s shareholders happy, but it is useful enough to me.
So, 9 months into ownership, do I regret getting a Skypephone? Stangely, no. It works well enough as a basic handset for me, I have my Skype running (when it updates) wherever I am, I don’t care about mobile games nor video calling, and the very fact it has Skype so heavily integrated makes the phone a talking point almost a year post launch.
I am tempted by the new model though…
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