3 Skypephone S2 Review

kaalakiota - thank you very much for your posting about the inbox - I had exactly the same problem. Of course, three said it was a problem with my sim and I'd need a new one. I figured out to delete some texts - I'm never letting three near anything of mine again!

It takes a lot to impress me, and with the 3 Skypephone S2, I am very impressed.

At £70 it was good value, at £40 (at which it is on temporary offer) it is an amazing bargain. I found phones costing considerably more, are nowhere as well made as this phone. The phone, according to my receipt, was originally selling at £106!

I have recommended this phone to several people, and all have gone out and bought it. They have not been disappointed.

They ability to use Skype, was all I wanted. That and to have a mobile phone, send texts. Everything else was a bonus.

Yes, the text when web browsing is very tiny, but too my surprise, it is not too difficult to read, though I have difficulties when tired.

I wish icq was an installed application.

The camera is not very good, and with 3.2 mega pixels it should have had an optical zoom.

There are minor gripes.

Yes, it should have a headphone socket.

The strobing bars as it is charging give no indication of the state of charge.

The battery, with occasionally accessing of the net, is lasting a day.

The phone gets hot in use which gives some idea of the power drain. I like the metal back plate, but I strongly suspect it is there as a heat sink.

Contrary to what one comment has said. You do not have to top up your credit to get Skype. It is free. If you do top up with credit you get for 3 months hundreds of free texts and free 3 to 3 calls.

It is annoying you cannot ditch the preloaded junk.

It should have the ability to access 3 e-mail, but this does not work.

I'm baffled why 3 offer a 3G dongle, when all you need to do is plug in your Skypephone.

Big problem I am having is with the 3 signal level. No bars a lot of the time, very slow download, many lost connections.

I plugged the Skypephone into my laptop, and found a data rate of 110 kilobits per second. 1 Megabit per second would have been acceptable, but ten times slower than this! I tried downloading icq 6.5. 7 kilobits per second!

Eats up battery power very fast.
Also you cannot use any bluetooth device for skype calls. I tried to use it car bluetooth handfree kit , it did not work.
Bluetooth device works fine for landline or mobile phone calls.

Skypephone S2 - is it a lemon?

Unfortunately I purchased a S2 just before Xmas and am having *great* problems with it.

Firstly it doesn't really browse the Internet - as extensively advertised by '3' - most mobile pages are short snippets of text on a screen so small the characters are unreadable. For a start it is impossible to go to My3 to check the balance of my account, I shall have to resort to a laptop to do that - if I can get it to connect to my account pages (which is an issue belonging to another thread). And as for accessing my Skype account pages - forget it - so I can't even do a top up with Skype on the S2.

Secondly frequently any web page displayed gets split into three overlapping panels - the middle one partly displayed but showing the central area, the other two, one on the right and one on the left, smaller and still only partly displayed. At this point the phone then becomes unresponsive and effectively crashes. I then have to switch it off and on again to reset it.

Thirdly it doesn't make calls to all Skype users. I tested it for some friends who have Skype on laptops and it seemed to call them OK - but not every time. But my brother in the Netherlands has a different Skypephone and it refused to connect and call him. Monitoring Skype on my laptop he had a small green tick icon against his id. On the S2 the icon was a greyed out cross. I tried refreshing the Skype connection (with the S2 this means switching the phone off and then on again) - yet no green tick showed against his Skype id. Also everytime I tried to connect to a Skype user the S2 started to make the connection, then displayed a square with an ! in the middle with a message underneath stating 'Divert on' - and then the connection usually crashed as unobtainable.

Fourthly the s/w driving the S2 is not stable - the phone frequently freezes - and the back button doesn't work. To get any response I have to switch the damn thing off and then on again.

On Boxing Day I tried sending a normal mobile text massage to a friend sitting beside me. She's on CWH T-Mobile. It took TWO HOURS TO FILTER THROUGH.

And I can't use the S2 with Skype for calling Skype Out nos. especially those in the UK.

Actually lemon is too good a description for S2 and '3' - cr&p is a much more suitable word.

AND READING ALL OF THE ABOVE POSTS ABOUT OTHER ISSUES WITH THE S2, MINE IS GOING BACK FOR A REFUND - HOW DARE '3' SELL ME SUCH A SHODDY PHONE AND SERVICE. THEY SHOULD BE DONE FOR FALSE ADVERTISING AND TRANSGRESSING THE TRADES DESCRIPTION ACT.