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.

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Nokia (They make phones, apparently…) have paid a stupid amount of money (254m Euros, £209m, $410m or 4 Esso Tiger Tokens) for Symbian. They already owned almost half of it already, but they went ahead to get the rest of it. What will they end up doing with the newly bought entity? Why, create an Open Source platform for phones. Where have I heard of that before…

The foundation will bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone in collaboration on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones.

[From BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian]

Open-Source platform? For mobile phones? Supposedly groundbreaking? No matter how you look at it, this looks and smells like an attempt to beat Google’s Android, even if Kai Oistamo (Exec-VP at Nokia) says it isn’t.

OTT comment of the day:

“We’re freeing up innovation - this is epoch-making.”
Nigel Clifford (Symbian)

No it’s not. Interesting? Yes. Epoch-making? Not even close.

Apple have unleashed possibly their worst kept secret ever.

Apple (United Kingdom) - iPhone:
Introducing iPhone 3G. With fast 3G wireless technology, Maps with GPS, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange and the new App Store, iPhone 3G puts even more amazing features in your hands.

Now, I have already said in the past that I wouldn’t have minded getting my own iPhone, but eventually I turned away, partly because of the excessive cost of the unit excluding the contract, partly the fact that it was a futuristic phone that did NOT have 3G. Now, with 3G, a decent GPS feature among other improvements, it’s enticing. The much lower initial cost is now comparable to other handsets.

BBC NEWS | dot.life | A blog about technology from BBC News | Hands on with iPhone 3G:
Questions to Greg Joswiak about refunds for anyone who has just recently bought the old iPhone were met with little sympathy as he pointed out that news of the 3G version was ‘hardly the best kept secret in the world”.

I do have to say it’s probably not a leaked secret. 3G has been such an asked for and complained about problem of the original iPhone that it was logical for Apple to work on this anyway, and for people to talk about it.
There was no leak. The hype and guessing was just correct on something obvious.