We’ve got a guinea pig for the 3 Skypephone!

3, the Irish 3G mobile phone operator announced a mobile phone that runs Skype, and an offer that looks on the surface like you can use SkypeOut to avoid paying 3 for most of your calls. They’ve hit the shops, and Damien Mulley, Irish tech blogger extrordinaire has got his hands on one.

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone