3 Skypephone S2 review

Posted by Rhiain Morgan on Tue 2 Sep 2008

Calls for free? What more could our blagging souls wish for?

Think Tesco Value, Sainsbury's basics and just everything in Woolworths really, and that's pretty much the quality of the first 3 Skypephone. Now, 3 are back with the S2 and the little blighter's had the spit and shine treatment, and doesn't he scrub up well?

Decked out in the latest must have mobile attire of a metallic back and sporting some sultry metallic keys, the phone feels sturdier than its predecessor . The Fisher Price inspired plastic casing has been cast off and replaced by a much smarter dark plastic. It is still plastic though, this isn't close to the Nokia Arte or Vertu's of the gadge world.

The homescreen has also been updated with a nifty carousel. Whizz through your widgets with merry aplomb, and launch everything with a touch of a button. A saviour to those thumbs that have had to endure sticky touchscreens and fiddly Windows Mobile menu systems.

But, Skype is where this phone exels, well you'd expect a jam tart to have good jam in right? Calling and chatting to Skype buddy's is easy and best of all it'll cost you no pennies at all. We chatted for hours and battery life held on for a whole day, but log onto the web and battery life is squeezed out a lot faster. Admitedly we chatted to just the one other person we know with a Skype account, which is a bit of a drawback with Skype.

Internet access is speedy and could compare with most other smart phones on the market, which is pretty impressive for such a small device.Downloading time is nothing to quip about, and webpages upload instantly. Perusing your mates latest "I'm depressed" status updates on Facebook is a breeze using the specific widgets on the home screen. They've got the essentials covered.

Skype loving snappers can also rejoice as the S2's camera has been juiced up from a mere 2mega-pixels to a mug shot capturing 3.2. Its not up there with the kings of 8mega pixels, but picture quality isnt half bad and they look bright and detailed on the bumped up 2.2-inch screen.

3 has come out fighting with this Skype baby, and we're impressed. Only problem is that although the Skype calls are free, the handset will set you back 70 quid, but then again thats not as much as some other handsets on the market that cost as much as a round the world trip- we're looking at you Jobsy.

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By digitaltoast

26|01|2009 21:47

This isn't going to be a feature review as such, more of a "having had it for 3 months, these are the bugs three deny the phone has and apparently have no plans to fix". It's also to let you know "you're not alone" if you had the same bugs or experience trying to get support from 3 customer services.

It's not all bad - I think the phone itself, an Amoi 8512 is actually a well-made, robust and fast phone. Also, the built-in modem works excellently via bluetooth and the cable - I easily get a sustained 1.3Mb down and 400k up, and it works fine for downloading BBC iPlayer stuff. It also allows me to use the "£5 for 3Gb" package, rather than the "£10 for 1Gb" package with other "mobile modem" users appear to be stuck with (correct me if I'm wrong) and with a 2-pack for £99 I'm not complaining on price!

Major Bugs:
Phone rebooting - I think this is a problem with the battery voltage sensor, because I was on the verge of taking both back and giving up (3 CS had "never heard of this" before!!) when they started behaving. I assume a few cycles of battery charge had done the trick (it was rebooting even with full battery).

The Gmail application was one of the selling points of the phone, and there is actually an inbuilt preset to download it. Until very recently, it didn't actually work (just giving square blocks for text). There is finally a working download of gmail and google maps, but before, When you called three CS, all you hear is that "no-one else has reported this problem" or "please reboot the phone" or "your signal is poor" or "please send it back for reflash" - and yet, both handsets are identical and I can find over 20 other forums posts with the same problem. Just me, eh? Maps still has a problem in that after about 600k, it says "out of memory", despite having 20Mb of phone memory and 1.8Gb of card memory left.

Other little annoyances are the lack of testing - when using the inbuilt browser, the error messages are less than helpful - how about:

"Received response with status code other than 200 that does not have body part However, notification is not given of redirection unless settings is to display body part when dialog is canceled."

When you send a message, it says "message has been sent to...", but when the other person reads it, it says "message has been sent to...", so it's difficult to know whether it has actually been received - it should, of course, be ""message has been received by...". Also, when selecting multiple items for deletion (pics, messages etc), it says "delete the marked?", which is poor English. Spelling mistakes pepper other areas of the phone, too. Not a problem, just not very polished.

When in text message function, the message count takes 20 mins (to do 400 messages)

You can't uninstall the useless pre-installed junk that clutters up the applications menu, and you can't remove Sky Sports from the feeds list. It also won't accept passworded feeds.

Java rendering problems - one of the first things I did was download Opera Mini which beats the pants off any other mobile browser, however they phone has a java graphics rendering problem with causes vertical stripes one pixel or so wide down the screen, so although it's readable, K for example would end up looking like <

Strange phone book error - or perhaps it's just me not understanding how the phonebook works:
I have set the phone to display "contacts displayed on SIM and phone", and I have copied the phone contacts to the SIM. However, there are just a few contacts which don't show in the contacts list, either when browsing or adding to an sms. But when you try and add the contact again it says "contact exists - overwrite?" (or something) and when you get an incoming call, it displays that caller's name. BUT I can't find it in the phone book!

Back button "bug" - I've seen several posts with people complaining that the back button is broken and causes the screen to break into blocks - actually, that's the way it's meant to be - the "blocks" are preview windows of page history, and this is quite a good feature, although it caught me out at first.

Here's an annoying which has nothing to do with the phone, but Yahoo and ebay FORCE me to use crappy mobile versions based on my IP! I've tried several suggestions, but if I'm using my home PC connected by the mobile modem, it is absolutely infuriating to be forced into a mobile version of the site. But that's not the phone's fault, just something I thought I'd mention if someone had a solution!

Other questions:
How can I mass-delete loads of rubbish from the T9 dictionary?
How can I backup text messages?

Overall, the phone has potential, but I'm very disappointed by the lack of support for both applications, and from three themselves. Almost every category you browse shows "sorry, there are no applications for this phone". It needs a firmware update and some support, although there is a forum at
http://www.3skypephone.com/forum/