So day 3 is now upon us with the shiny new 3SkypePhone from 3. The battery life is good so far, with it showing only about 70% of the availble battery still left. I have tried to push as many Skype calls through it as possible.

This is where it begins to show the cracks.

The one-off novelty call, and all is well. You can sing the praises of the unit and ponder how it will change the face of mobile telephony. 60 minutes later, and you start to realise that maybe this mobile telephony nirvana isn't as close as you first thought.

It's hard to describe, but I think the whole experience is pretty much like the early days of analogue mobile calls. You remember that? The call quality was like talking through tin cans with lots of repeating of sentences and dropped words. But back then, we were so god damn excited to be standing in the middle of a street with a brick to our heads talking. The novelty and sence of occassion out weighed any practical limitations of the service, like actually hearing the other person!

Sadly this is what a prolonged Skype conversation is like on the 3SkypePhone. We ended up ditching the handset and resorting back to the PC Skype version. There should be no reason for this, since 3 tell's us that the actual voice from the handset to their network goes through their voice network and not over the 3G network. Only when the voice reaches 3, do they transcode it to data and push it out to the Skype network.

The other review unit has been rebooting itself, 3 times ironically in a 24hr period alone. The unit I have hasn't exhibited that particular quirk yet.

On the plus side of things, I have to thank Mark for leaving a comment in yesterdays entry indicating how I can check the status of my account. You access this through the "My3" option.

The big test comes tomorrow as I travel down to London on the train. More later.