New Mobile Phones, Latest Mobile Releases

The prospect of free calls from a mobile phone is certainly a tempting one, although the way that mobile phone tariffs are structured and promoted these days might lead one to believe that they have already been available.

Network operators are clever in the way that they market their tariffs by including what they call ‘free’ minutes and text, when looked at from a different angle though the consumer soon finds that these are not ‘free’ calls or text messages at all but instead they have to pay a monthly line rental in order to be allocated the ‘free’ time.

This has always been different with Sykpe calls, users can make calls to other Sykpe users completely free of charge making this a very attractive proposition when integrated into a mobile phone and so we come to the new Skypephone from 3, or to give it its official name the 3Skypephone. (All one word)

This new device looks like a pretty unremarkable mobile phone until it is investigated further, the exterior of the phone comes in three different colours, White / Pink, White / Blue and Black and all feature a big dedicated Skype button located prominently below the main display.

The phone is actually very lightweight at 68g and its overall dimensions fit that of a good quality handset at 100 x 44 x 13.6 mm, the colours are not overall paint jobs, the White / Blue and White / Pink are merely accents that surround the handset, the majority of the handset is coloured white whereas the Black version is completely black.

The main display is a substantial 2 inches making for easy text reading and the buttons are well spaced, this is a good thing as the phone comes with Skype IM or instant messaging which most users will have used from a PC with a full qwerty keyboard, in the SkypePhones case the messages have to be inputted via the handsets keypad very much like standard texting.

This new handset features a 2.0 megapixel camera, a good lens that can capture quality still pictures and short video clips plus photo editing software for touching up those works of art.

The 3 SkypePhone is a 3G device although it does not offer the secondary camera found on a lot of similar handsets for video calling, the 3G technology allows for fast download speeds and access to a multitude of mobile content, information and entertainment. Users can download new games, ringtones, wallpapers and themes, watch new movie trailers before they are released and catch up with the days news and sports headlines with streaming media.

There is also an MP3 player which can be filled with music tracks from a PC or downloaded direct from the mobile internet via 3G before being arranged into playlists, the player also incorporates a built-in equalizer for better sound quality.

The 3SkypePhone is a significant move towards internet based, mobile technology, there are other VOIP enabled devices available but none of them incorporate the technology and speeds of 3 Mobile or do they offer the inexpensive tariffs or already configured Skype service.