Review: 3 X-Series Gold package mobile phone service

Watch TV, control your PC, make Skype calls or IM friends – all on your mobile phone

3 has made a great deal of its X-Series service, which combines entertainment and communications on a mobile phone, allowing you to surf the internet, make VoIP calls and watch TV.

We tested the Gold package, which includes services such as Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Ebay and Yahoo, live internet streams of some TV stations, the ability to control your PC remotely via the Orb and to access and watch your home TV via a Slingbox. There is also a Silver service, which serves up just a little less, excluding the TV elements and the Orb.

The services were pretty easy to set up – it was largely just a case of entering account and password details for each. And if you don’t already have a Skype or Windows Live (or MSN) Messenger account, you can set one up using the phone.

For the Slingbox, which allows you to control and watch your home TV, you obviously need to own the device, which 3 will sell to you should you wish. Here, as with the Orb, you need to download and install the software first, but again, this was easy.

Using Live Messenger was much like texting, although we did find a bug that made it awkward to write messages that go over more than one line when predictive text was switched off. We found that rather than allowing you to type the letter you want, it would only pick the first letter on the key you were pressing, which meant you had to type the wrong letter, then the correct letter, then go backwards and delete the unwanted character.

With Skype you can only make free Skype-to-Skype calls. You can’t make Skypeout calls. We found the call clarity in our tests to be very good. Fans of Skype’s IM function will be disappointed though, as this is disabled. Equally, you can’t make voice calls over Windows Live and for both services, video calls are not enabled.

You’re limited to 10,000 Windows Live messages a month, equivalent to 300 a day, which we think is plenty. With Skype, you can make 5,000 minutes of calls a month and receive an unlimited amount. Again, we think this is very good.

The real draw for this service is its TV options. For 49p you can buy 24 hours' viewing time of a single station, such as ITV1. Alternatively, you can buy one month’s unlimited access to all the stations on the service for £5.

It’s a live stream, but we were a little disappointed by the service. The picture was a little blocky, although still watchable, but even with the headphones turned up to maximum the sound was barely audible – certainly near impossible to hear when sitting on a train or bus.

The Slingbox was a different story. We were already fans of the Slingbox (see review), so it was no surprise that the service on a mobile phone was also excellent. You get a decent picture watching normal programmes, although fast action – such as football – is harder to follow, as it doesn’t refresh quickly enough to give you a clear picture.

Changing channels is easy, although controlling your TV, such as pausing or fast forwarding, is a little fiddly. You can also access Freeview stations via the Slingbox. We did struggle, however, to use the record function, unless we took the long route of accessing Sky’s electronic programme guide.

Unlike with the internet TV service, you cannot elect to watch the Slingbox stream in landscape on your phone’s screen. But you get 80 hours of combined Slingbox and Orb usage a month, which is OK but not great.

For all of these services to work you must be in a 3G area and should you move out, then your signal will drop. While this wasn’t such an issue with Skype and Windows Live, as it is much as you expect now when going through a tunnel, it was frustrating when watching the TV and highlighted just how many areas are not yet 3G enabled.

At the time of writing, the packages are available on Nokia’s N73 mobile phone, which is a good product, but we did find that watching TV quickly drained the battery. A full charge gave us around two hours 40 minutes of TV before the battery was dead.

Despite this, 3’s X-Series is a good service, particularly when you think that we are still in the infancy of mobile TV. Currently, the Gold package costs £27.50 a month for the first eight months, rising to £45 thereafter. The Silver service costs £22 a month, rising to £40 after eight months, and for both the full prices will put many people off. But you do get a lot of extras for your money, so it will appeal to heavy mobile phone users.

Also consider:
Virgin Mobile Lobster 700TV phone
It will undoubtedly get better as time goes on, but the limited crop of channels, poor quality and reception issues make it difficult to recommend at present

Vodafone Mobile TV
A great way to watch TV on your mobile, but don't expect amazing quality or certain hit shows