After our previous tests with the new Skype for iPhone and the news that the application worked placing calls over 3G for people running iPhone OS 3.0 Beta on their iPhone 3Gs, we wondered: will it work on the first generation iPhone running OS 3.0 Beta over an EDGE network? The answer is yes, albeit with a few caveats.

Chat works fine with no problems and our test call to the Echo / Skype test bot worked fine as well. We could clearly hear the announcement to leave a message to be played back to us and the playback was nice and clear. However, when we attempted to place calls or receive calls to each other, it kept failing. Placing calls didn't work. Then when we attempted to receive a call, we were met with a warning that there was "no microphone connected" and to "please plugin a microphone" before the call failed and Skype for iPhone crashed. We then grabbed our headset, plugged it into the iPhone and received another call and this time it worked without a problem.

However, the call was similar to trying to Skype over a shoddy connection or when one is also downloading multiple torrents over bit torrent. There was a heavy delay and some slight garbling of the speech, so that to use this effectively, you would need to treat it like speaking on a two-way radio, saying "OVER" after every comment so the person on the other end of the call would know when it was safe for him/her to speak again. So for those of you who were wondering if it works, it does.