It’s the second mobile I’ve had to play with and write about on my blog. The first was O2’s Cocoon, where my general conclusion was great blogger relations campaign, shame that it was for a really bad phone. I did one post on it and I wrote a second that I never posted. Basically I was struggling to say anything positive about the Cocoon, other than “it’s OK as an MP3 player, but far too big for just that”. Rather than just criticise the phone I decided to say nothing.
One key difference about the O2 Cocoon campaign and the Skypephone campaign is that you were told that you could keep the Cocoon, whereas the Skypephone has to go back.
Now that’s a real shame. I’m still using the O2 Cocoon, but only as an occasional MP3 player (minus the hideous headphones O2 supplies with it). It would have been no great loss to have had to send it back.
The Skypephone on the other hand I want to keep! It’s great. It’s really well designed and feels like a quality piece of kit. It’s small and easy to use. I haven’t even looked at the manual as everything I’ve wanted to do is intuitive (compared to the Cocoon where even if you did read the manual you were no further forward).
So far the call quality has been fantastic. I’ll definitely blog a bit more about it, once I’ve had chance to play a bit more.
I’ve only discovered two negatives so far. The first is that you need to top it up with £10 credit each month. As I already have a contract phone (that I can’t do without) it’s just a bit too much to make it worth it. In a perfect world I would use both phones. Even with the Skypephone I’d still need my HTC TyTN II (or the T-mobile version of it which is an MDA Vario III) as it has a proper screen and keyboard which are essential for email and web browsing.
The second is that 3’s 3G reception appears to be a bit dodgy, which is surprising as that’s all it does. My T-mobile 3G reception appears to be much better. On the train from Leeds to London I had T-mobile reception more often than I had 3 reception. That could be a problem.
I’ll post more later, in the meantime you can check out what Wolfstar account executive Beth Kay has to say about it as 3 actually very sensibly sent two handsets and she’s currently trialling the other one.
Stuart, why did you feel that you had to say something positive about the Cocoon? Isn't that the point of reviewing? You say what you thing – good or bad….
I await your verdict, I like the idea of the skype phone, not sure about having to top up every month, but the feature I like is that for £5 per month you can connect it to your laptop and go on the internet etc, which for mobile working sounds perfect!
Interesting what you say about 3's network, Stuart. I've been trialling the Skypephone since the launch at the end of Oct. It's a terrific phone for Skype calls.
Yet the biggest issue I have is 3's poor 3G network connectivity where I am. While you don't actually need a 3G connection to make or receive Skype calls and texts, you do need 3G for Skype to log in and synchronize.
A bit of a show stopper, I think.
Hi Stuart, really interesting to here your opinions on the two campaigns. i worked on the cocoon campaign and was also given a trial phone – thought that it looked really cool but didin't do everything a phone should now nowadays.
look forward to hearing more of your views on the skype phone.