James Galvin

From Techcrunch UK:

The finer details of the long-awaited Skype phone announcement from mobile operator Three break this morning, but quite a lot is known already about the deal which the network hopes will revive its flagging fortunes.

A mobile phone from Three will be available in UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden, allowing you to make and receive phone calls using Skype, by pressing a ‘Skype’ button on the handset. I’ve always been amazed by the lack of options we have in Ireland for wireless Skype handsets. In the past, I tried some wi-fi handsets from Linksys and Belkin, and they were both atrocious. As much as I can’t stand Three, I will be keeping my eye out for this one, although it is a shame that you are only allowed to make Skype calls to other Skype numbers by the looks of it.

MAXroam has launched today - congrats to Pat and Cubic Telecom.

I have seen other travel SIM services. Why is MAXroam better?

The common method for all “alternative roaming” SIM’s is to originate their service in somewhere like Latvia, Estonia or Liechtenstein, or via a UK-based toll-free phone number. This approach doesn’t work very well. We know because our first product “Roam4Free” used this method.

The problem is that people have to call a strange country code just to call you. It just isn’t intuitive and it isn’t user-friendly. With MAXroam we have made the service work as you would expect plus we’ve added a lot of new features that you will have never seen before.

Looks like a very useful product. A nice feature is that you can add up to 50 different phone numbers on the one SIM card. Only downside for me is the minor hassle of having to unlock my old phone and set this up. I would never admit this, but I’d sooner pay €150 to get the MAXroam SIM bundled with a new phone.

Or as some might say: “motherfucking 3 is a motherfucking pain”. Thats Three as in Ireland’s newest mobile network, the crowd with the ads of weird people on buses, and cherries that sing to Japanese kids (theres always someone in the cinema who laughs). Yesterday I signed up with them, don’t ask me why. I was seduced by a fancy new phone (a Nokia 6280) and the promise of football highlights immediately after every game.

The phone is great - I set up my serene Gougane Barra wallpaper and copied over my home-made Lee Perry and Flaming Lips ringtones via USB - I had been told this would be a problem in Linux, but no such thing… just a copy & paste to /media/usbdisk. Set up my contacts, installed Zelda, and I was nearly done.

The network, on the other hand, is not so good. The main reason I got the phone with the 3G broadband coverage was to tinker with the technology… get some RSS feeds and DAFT alerts, check my email, log onto my server, access my Freevo to set up some recordings, etc. Its only now I’m finding out that this is not possible thanks to 3’s infamous “walled garden”. Three limits your internet access only to sites that they choose. You buy access to what they call “the internet” - at the moment I’m using their Daily Free Trial (up to 1 hour / 2MB usage) - but it is extremely restricted. Its good enough for your average user, he can sneakily check Wikipedia during his pub quiz, but it doesn’t suit me.

There is a system for suggesting new sites, I don’t know how effective it is, but they charge you for the privilege. Might not be expensive, but thats beside the point.

We are constantly looking to improve our range of websites. if you would like to suggest one, text the address to 36663 and we’ll look into it. Each text is charged at the standard rate.

Whats worse is that they charge you for reporting an error on their part:

If you arrived at this page from a link one on of our listed websites, please let us know by texting us the website name you were visiting on the above number.

I thought about whether or not I could get around these restrictions. Even among the approved websites, access is solely through port 80, which rules out POP/IMAP, FTP, SSH and other services. I thought about forwarding my mails to my 3mail account, but there is an issue there with a maximum number of mails allowed by 3mail. So maybe I could set up some filters to ensure that only the important mails were forwarded. Alternatively, I could avail of ‘Gmail Lite’, which I was happy to see on the list of approved websites. No such luck though - “the services of gmailwireless.com have been discontinued”.

The free football highlights are great, but the comedy, music and all that stuff I can do without because there’s no way I’m going to pay €2 each for a 3 minute clip that I wouldn’t even watch on YouTube. I’ll have to think about what to do now, apparently this phone can only be unlocked by 3, and I don’t want to know what they’ll charge for that, but o2 is looking very tempting again.