Better late than never… my Skypephone review!

  

 

Life needed me in recent months and I do apologise to the folks at 3mobilebuzz  for not reviewing the Skypephone sooner.  Having done an awful lot of work on mobile phones and consumer buyer behaviour, I’d like to explain how I feel the consumer mobile phone market is currently segmented.  There are more or less 3 different types of consumers in the mobile phone market: 

• ‘Techno-geeks’ who love technology and who love to have the latest technology
• ‘Love-phone’ who will choose their mobiles on the basis of trends and aesthetics
• Cost-conscious consumers or ‘technophobes’ who will choose a network and tariff based on cost and who will end-up with a cheap mobile phone. The more you pay monthly the better the phone, the cheaper the tariff, the cheaper the phone (unless you are willing to pay extra money for a good handset)

 I feel that the 3 Skypephone appeals to the latter segment. 3 was the latest entrant on the market and it has been rather difficult for them to enter this saturated market. 3 has also sadly been the victim of bad WoM due to poor coverage in certain areas of the country. 

The 3 Skypephone is a great little phone – sleek, nice blue back-light and intuitive. In other words, ideal for cost-conscious consumers! In terms of technology, the 2 million mega-pixel camera is good although Samsung launched the G600 which has a 5 million mega-pixel camera more or less at the same time. The Skype function is simply amazing and will probably reduce your bills quite a lot. My flatmate calls her parents in Australia who also own a Skypehphone for free.  

However I find the button hard to press and it’s a shame that you cannot use your Skype credit to call mobile phones or landlines – well I guess 3 would go bust if they allowed it! I also find the signal a little weak at times resulting in me not being able to use the Skype function.  Overall, I think the Skypephone is a great little phone for technophobes – easy to use and cost effective.

Unfortunately I am not the target market for this phone… I think that the UK market is increasingly heading towards Blackberries and Windows based phones and this is probably what I will go for when upgrading in April.  Looks like Blackberry is likely to suffer stiff competition from Windows based mobiles in 2008…