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Last Christmas dad bought a pair of 3 Skypephones. The one he gave to me was a total dissapointment since we had misunderstood the "Free Skype" part of the deal. What it means is that you get 30 days of free Skype usage after you topup your normal phone credit. I usually use my landline for phonecalls which meant that to get 30 days of free Skype usage I would have to keep paying for it since I wouldn't actually make any mobile calls. After the second time I paid to play i decided it was useless for myself. Dad on the otherhand has used his almost everyday since then. A few weeks ago he had to replace his phone for a new one. "Replace" in this case meant he went and bought another one after realising that the phones were quite flakey and that the customer services people were clueless. At this point he started looking for an alternative.

Follow up:

I dug up a couple of Nokia E65 Symbian phones from Ebay for about £80 each. The first thing I did was try Fring which lets you use several IM clients as well as Skype. It seemed pretty straightforward. First you create a Fring user account and then you see a list of the available clients. We picked Skype and then entered the user details. Everything seemed fine except that we couldn't make calls to other Skype users, we could receive them just fine though. To make outgoing Skype calls you have to use the SkypeOut option (by Skype) which is a pay to play system.

The next thing was to try the official Skype Mobile client. Installed quickly and had it configured in no time. It took about a minute to login after which we fould that you couldn't make or receive incoming calls without SkypeOut credits for both.

Finally stumbled across a way to download the Skype client provided by the 3 network. The trick is to go online using the WAP client for the phone. Head over to Planet 3 either by the phones Home Page, Web Bookmark menu or just by googling it. Alternatively you can just follow the link I posted at the start of this paragraph. Once installed that let us make and receive calls as before for free. It's cool because when you go online via the 3G network the time is taken off your Skype time, not the data one. I think this essentially means we now have a pair of Nokia E65 3 Skypephone Hybrids. So problem is 100% solved. this forum post has loads more information about the ins and outs of this. I just found the link now, would of been handy earlier

I should point out that for this to work we moved the 3 Sim card from the SkypePhone and into the Nokia E65. I then hooked the phone up to the PC and did a software update on it. That seemed to also install all the default 3 settings which meant when we went online with 3 WAP the default Home Page was already set for the Planet 3 link.

The trick to using it is to load up the Skype application on the phone and then use the App key on the phone to switch back to the Standby screen. That allows you to keep using the phone as normal whilst leaving Skype connected in the background. I'm not sure what happens when a call comes in, I'd assume it either rings and you can App key it back to the Skype client to accept the call or maybe it does a popup on the Standby screen, I'm hoping for the later.