Part I - Device not compatible - Skype on 3

3 advertise all over the place about their free Skype – Skype calls, giving the impression that if you buy a 3 phone, you’ll be given Skype.. right? I have 3 mobiles at home, one ZTE F102 (a 3Skype phone I use for business), one HTC TyTN II (personal) and a Sony Ericsson K800i (collecting dust). The only “out of box” skype compatible phone was the ZTE, and the others I’ve had to mess around with endlessly to get working! (In fairness, the TyTN II wasn’t a 3 mobile, but they do sell them) It’s very irritating to be told one thing, and then find your were shafted after handing over the green..

I’ve managed to fix both of my devices so that skype is working almost flawlessly, and now that I’ve figured it out, I want to share the knowledge in the hope that it will help others out.

This post is in two parts. Wanting Windows Mobile? Go to Part II

I’ll start with the Sony Ericsson, I’d never even tried Skype on the K800i as it was just a mobile that appeared out of no-where (I assume I accepted it in return for some favour). However after giving it away (letting my friend know he could Skype for free etc!), I had to take it back in order to fix the lack of Skype support it apparently had. I tried the obvious – went on to the 3 website with it and was promptly told that the device wasn’t supported.. weird seeing as Skype is a java app and the K800i has java built in.

Luckily it was an easy fix, as I said java is fully supported on the K800i so all I needed to do was get the latest version of Skype for 3 devices from another source (broken), copy it to the device and install!
Bare in mind however, I’ve noticed that “not supported” seems to be code for “we haven’t yet written the program for your display settings”, so you may notice Skype displays a little off the screen. I did, but it didn’t make any difference to the functionality and can still be used without any issues.

Here you are, I’ve even uploaded the Skype.jar file for you!

Click to download

Try it and let me know how you get on (Comments are open). If you’re Australian, please scroll down to the bottom of this post for your version!

I’ve included a quick image show below. Click for full size.

Select Skype.jar

Install to root

Allow all of this

Continue

Launch, you're installed!

Now sign in. You can see that the resolution is a little off, well that is as bad as it gets! Awesome considering it was "not supported", right?

Go to Part II

Update!

For my Australian readers, here is the Australian 3 version:

Skype .jar

Enjoy!