Review: 3 X-Series Gold package mobile phone service

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.

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