I had a cold call from BT recently offering me a cut of £2 a month on my broadband package plus free phone calls at weekends and in the evenings if I signed up for a fresh yearly contract. Since inertia would have made this happen anyway, I signed up. This at least shows that inflation isn't going up everywhere. Thanks to fierce competition, improving technology and the growing influence of "free" or very cheap calls from new web start-ups, telephone inflation is falling. The exception is using data from abroad for music or videos where roaming charges are still usurious.The ultimate vision is of cheap handsets using wireless hotspots to route calls through the internet to anyone in the world with a Wi-Fi connection. And all for free after paying a monthly fee to an internet service provider. This is already possible with some phones. The snag is that, like fax machines, it is not much use having one until everyone you want to talk to has one as well.There is an added problem. Skype is the runaway success of web telephony, even though it is mainly used for calls between computer users. It is free for all basic voice and video uses, but is proprietary and so far can't communicate with rivals using open standards such as Truphone, the first web phone company to put an app on Apple's iPhone.Truphone is impressive, but I also have a soft spot for 3's Skype phone, which is the only phone so far that employs Skype technology. This is because when I first tried it a year or two ago it worked straight out of the box, which hasn't happened with any other web phone - though they are getting better. Once I had typed in my login, all my existing Skype contacts (which are stored on the web) were on the screen and I had an hour's free chat with a friend using Skype from his computer.I had a similar experience with 3's new Skype phone, which hits the shops this week. It employs 3's global 3G network to originate and terminate calls while using the Skype network to route them around the world. This means that if you have a family scattered around the world - or run a small business - you could buy everyone a Skype phone for Christmas and gossip almost endlessly for nothing without needing Wi-Fi.The cost is only £69 for the handset - plus, if you want to use the Skype facility, a pay-as-you-go tariff of £10 a month. Not bad. The phone can also be used as a modem (or dongle) automatically by attaching a cable from it to the USB port of your laptop (PCs only) so you could use your computer abroad without incurring those ludicrous roaming charges.Other functions are also easy to use. A single button on the right side of the handset activates a "carousel" of services on the screen such as Google, web feeds, Facebook (which worked well), messages plus a "Quicklinks" button giving access to more sites from eBay to the BBC or music. There is a 3.2 megapixel camera and media player all packed into a device weighing less than 100g.Niggles? The keyboard didn't suit my fingers and it was tricky to bookmark new sites - not that you need them with so many embedded - and it takes at least six separate clicks to send each photo to a laptop via Bluetooth. But these are small gripes when you remind yourself that it costs only £69 outright (or free on a contract).Sales of 3's first model have been expanding fast from a small base, but are still only a bit over 100,000 units - a minnow in an ocean of giant fish. It is hoping that word of mouth will eventually propel it to a tipping point where people want to get one because their friends have one. This is a very tough market to crack, but it is a very cost-effective product. It would be a tragedy, however, if we end up with two competing systems - Skype versus all the non-proprietary ones - which don't talk to each other.
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