Nice in theory.
From my experience the Skype and other services such as msn and mobile tv are simply used as a carrot to get people to sign up to 3. Once locked in to the contract you soon realise the customer support can be hard to deal with (sales call centre is in Glasgow, support call centre is in India) and that the promised services work poorly if at all.
Skype for 3:
- random log out of skype even in areas with full signal
- incoming Skype calls rejected even though you're logged in with full signal (caller goes straight to voicemail or gets a message that you can't answer at this time)
- outgoing Skype calls often fail even though calling the same person from a pc works fine
- totally unreliable presence information, contacts shown as logged in when they're not - or vice versa.
- very variable call quality - ranging from good to totally unintelligible - seems to be capacity problems at peak times.
All the above and more are commonplace on the original Skype phone or the "Skype for 3" java or s60 client. Take a look at this complaints thread on the Skype forum:
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=159891
I'd be very interested to hear whether three have corrected any of these problems with the shiny new Skypephone S2.
Also note all calls will cut off if you move from a 3G to a 2G area whilst in a call, forcing you to redial. Be very cautious if you live near the edge of their 3G area, the contact small print (clause 5.9) mentions the 2g/3g call drop problem but you can be sure the sales rep won't. (No other UK network drops calls in this manner but as three don't own a 2G network they have to rent one from O2 and they'd rather cut you off than invest in the equipment which would allow smooth call handovers from 3G to 2G)
That said for basic telephony/mobile internet 3 are *cheap* compared to the competition and if you maintain the patience of a saint whilst speaking slowly and clearly, you can usually get things done when calling the Indian customer support centre.