Skype very kindly emailed me, with a nice image-based email, to tell me I can use the Skypehone S2 (see my ‘lived-in’ review here), or another Skype-enabled mobile to save money when I call abroad:

International calls from your mobile at great rates. Skype To Go is exclusive to our monthly subscriptions. Simply call the Skype To Go number – it’s a local number – from your mobile and talk unlimited* to countries within your subscription.

Skype also suggest that I might want to get a Skypephone because they are great:

The 3 Skypephone is a stylish mobile with Skype included. Make free Skype-to-Skype calls at the push of a button, plus now call phones and mobiles abroad on Skype at great low rates.

Either way round, Skype is a useful service for those obsessed with long calls to far-flung places, or those with lots of friends toting the Skype client – or both! Check out Skype’s website here.

The N95-8GB comes with music!

3UK has confirmed that it will be the first operator in the UK to support the “Comes With Music” service – from 3rd Nov, the service will be available, on Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95-8GB devices, when signing to an £35/month contract (for 18 months).

You might remember Dusan reported about Comes With Music being offered by the Carphone Warehouse in devices it was retailing, but now with an Operator on board (and a content-focused one at that!), momentum is gathering – let’s see who signs up next…

(Note: the image above is from the Nokia UK site for the N95-8GB SIM-free “comes with music” edition – you can check that out here. Else-wise, check out Three UK’s site here.)

[Via: GSMworld.com]

GSMworld.com has an interesting story about a new mobile handset player coming to market, backed by a seriously big parent company. The vendor will be called INQ Mobile (check out their holding website here), and Hutchison is the parent company – so you can expect a seriously competent “connected” device (or devices!) from them…

On the back of the success with 3’s Skyephone (3 obviously being another subsidiary of Hutchison), you can expect that the “social” connectively will be in the form of integrated apps like Facebook, Instant Messengers, and VoIP (probably Skype).

Apparently, according to Reuters, the first HSPA phone will be coming in the UK and Australia for year-end, and then onwards to other operators next year. It is claimed there are four more phones coming next year with a sub-$200 price-tag. For those interested, Flextronics and Foxconn will be an device production duties.

This should be a cracker! Knowing 3’s marketing, expect something explosive when it does go on sale!

[Via: GSMworld.com]

At a recent press conference (covered by Reuters), 3UK CEO Kevin Russell had a number of interesting things to say – some headlines below:

• 3 are focusing on mobile broadband and Internet-based mobile services (such as Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype) to lure customers over to their network
• More than 600,000 customers have mobile broadband kit now
• Mobile Termination Rates (the fees that Mobile Operators charge each other to terminate others’ calls in to their networks) in the UK are set at a level that makes it very difficult for 3UK to lower call prices any more

There are some key things that you can read from this – firstly that 3UK is heavily positioning to become a broadband provider (which it pretty much has the network to do), but also they are looking at their capacity and cost base, and trying to compete on all axes. Quite where the regulatory framework will go is anyone’s guess, but I would bet that 3UK will be trying to really drive cost reduction in order to further boost their business against the four larger incumbents.

[Via: Reuters]

T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) and 3UK have joined forces to beef up the hi-speed links between their base units. Interestingly it’s BT wholesale that is the middleman here, so they have got to be happy with what will surely have been a nice deal size!

The question I guess is what is the bandwidth of these links – probably SEVERAL times that of your home DSL connection

[Via: Techwatch]

Italian Mobile OpCos Wind and 3 Italia have failed to sell their jointly owned cellular tower network – dubbed Eiffel – to local firm Digital Multimedia Technologies (DMT)

Apparently, the sale of the roughly 18,000 Mobile masts had been valued at about 1.5 bn EUR – so not inconsequential! The trend of some Operators either selling off their physical networks, or partnering on networks, seems to have hit and missed on this occasion. One wonders though whether we’ll see this story re-appear with a new (or even same) buyer in the near future…..

[Via: telegeography.com]

UK: 3 has partnered with GetJar (a mobile apps aggregator), to offer a huge library of free applications. Customers of 3 will now be able to download popular applications such as “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps for Mobile, Yahoo!Go, eBuddy, mig33, MyWaves, and Nimbuzz”

GetJar has managed to pass 300 million downloads by itself, so I would imagine adding 3 to the equation will help boost that a good deal – and 3 gets to encourage users to try out more applications in to the bargain – I call that a win-win!

There are apparently over 10,000 free apps, and these cover operating systems or execution environments like “Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm (NSDQ: PALM), BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), or Flash Lite” – soon to be followed by Android.

[Via: Marketwatch]

O2, T-Mobile (NYSE: DT), Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), and 3 have all now signed up as members (alongside existing member Orange) of the Internet Advertising Bureau, in the UK. The Operators have formed a Mobile Steering Group to oversee the Mobile Advertising strategy of the IAB.

When the IAB conducted a survey last year, they found that mobile advertising lacked  standards, and also measurement systems. The IAB will therefore focus on research and promotion of mobile advetising, in addition to the commitment the Operators have made to the Mobile Marketing Association – which focuses on best practice and consumer privacy.

This is definitely a good move – so much of mobile advertising lacks structure, that it’s really great to see big players stepping in to set up frameworks to Ad delivery.

[Via: Brand Republic]

Hey, you there, in the UK – want a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N96? ‘Course you do. But where, oh where, may you purchase the uber-device from?

Well, it appears either Vodafone (above), or Three (below):

N96 on Three (pre-order)

Mmmmh, N96, very tasty – and now you can get one – or at least, you can from 1st October (Three), or 2nd October (Vodafone)

So there you go, if you want it, you can pre-order online – click here for Vodafone, and here for Three sites.

(Thanks to Colin for letting us know about that one )

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:

Skypephone back casing

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 (NSDQ: GOOG), 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 (NSDQ: RIMM). 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:

Skypephone S2 and box

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!