I'm back after a short break in non-3-land...

...with a Skypephone and my trusty old N73.

Goes without saying that my Skypephone couldn't connect to Skype service as much as it tried and wished it could.  It did of course work at Stansted on the way there and back.  Had a fun time Skype-chatting (is there a shorter word for this?) with my brother-in-law whilst cheekily hogging two power outlets T-mobiles WiFi section in Stansted.  The funny thing with the 'chats' is that when you're conversing with someone who has a full qwerty keyboard they oftern forget (or don't know) that you can't keep up with their 1000-words per minute!

And another thing about Skype 'Chats' is that you have no idea when chats took place.  So, yesterday I arrive back and as soon as I can I power up my phones.  They're both beeping like mad with emails (one week without Yahoo! Mail!!) and chats.  I have no way of telling when a chat was started so confused the hell out of one recipient who asked me a question a few days previously which I was unaware of as... I had no Skype service!

The Skypephone was a great music player, mostly because of it´s size and the amazingly usefullness of high quality full stereo sound with wireless bluetooth headphones.  I now hate going back to wires and wished all phones had this ability.  I should point out though that the phone doesn´t come with BT headphones, I already had some.  Maybe 3 should do a ´music edition´ of the phone (a la Nokia) where they charge a bit more but bundle in a 2 gig memory card and BT headphones.  Hey, they could even combine this somehow with the 3MusicStore (again, a la Nokia).

I got more battery life out of my Nokia as a side benefit as it wasn´t having to provide me with directions (TomTom, Nokia Maps) and music at the same time!

On a side note, I really enjoyed 3´s new EU rates.  Not as good as being able to use my inclusive minutes (like with 3-Like-Home) but way better than previous trips to non-3 countries.  I enjoyed being able to do Yahoo! searches for free and sending picture messages for the same price as a plain old text.

That´s all for now, got a lot of stuff to catch up...