“Lived-in” review – Skypephone S2

So, the folks at Skype were nice enough to lend me a Skypephone S2 to play with – and in the time-honoured tradition of telling you my thoughts, I present a “lived-in” review. This means simply that given I only had the device for a couple of weeks, I can’t tell you details that you would get from 6 months of usage – however, I can tell you the opinions I formed in the short time I had it.

The S2 is the follow-up to the original Skypephone, which if you remember was white/ice blue in colour, and did pretty well in the target markets – which, in this case, are Hutchison 3G (Brand name “Three”) operating countries, since this is a Three-branded device:

It’s here I’ll begin to feed in my thoughts, since I think the hardware is a great improvement over the original. Not that the first skypephone was bad, just that this one looks and feels very nice indeed. Good job Three design team!

Not such a great job however with the keys on the device – if you look at the first pic you’ll see a ring of keys (three per side) around “Menu” and “C” markings. Now I have reasonably big hands (!), but I still kept catching the wrong key, since they are the bar type, favoured on devices such as the N82 and K810i. Bar keys are fine, just not on top of each other!

Moving on the software, there’s a raft of well-known services on the device – key amongst these is of course Skype – but there is also Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, and Google, amongst others. In addition, all the usual suspects in terms of browser and media player are there in the menu too, for good measure.

Now what of the apps? Well Skype works well, although my feeling is that the client makes a circuit-switched call (this is where Three has tons of capacity), and that gets converted via a server to VoIP once it gets in the Network core. So kinda cheating, but hey, do what works I say!

I was disappointed a bit at Facebook, since it’s just a cached login page, or “stub”, rather than a special app, like the one that has been designed for Blackberry. As such, logging in to the minimalist WAP site didn’t excite me much at all.

All the other functions on the phone work well enough, and it’s well put together – both in terms of build and box contents:

In summary, this is a GOOD little phone – both diminuative, and keenly-priced. It’s really centred around services, with quick access to all apps via a carousel homescreen menu, and it does what it set out to do well. A decent battery and quality packaging round off a well-presented offering from Three. Overall, very good indeed – buy one if you love your “social networking”-type services!

Thanks to both Peter and Gemma for organising the loan of the device!