In Spain simyo (www.simyo.es , Spanish only) offers a pretty cheap prepaid service: 9 Euro-cent/min to any phone – fixed and mobile - inside Spain, and 99 cent for 100 MB (!) of data per day. The data tariff seems to come with a trick: from what I heard the 100 MB are only valid if you consume them in one single connection. So you should make your daily Skype calls in one single session. If you connect various times a day they charge you 9 cent per 100 KB, which seems to me still not exaggerated. International calls are 30 cent/min to most countries, except Cuba, North Korea and Somalia and some others. All that prices do not include taxes (16% on Spain mainland). – They also have relatively decent roaming tariffs inside Europe.

According to the information on their website you need a physical address in Spain to which they can send the chip and where you receive it personally. They do not say that you have to be a national or a resident, so the address of a hotel may work. From what I know they ship usually within two to three days after your order over the Internet. At present the initial cost for the chip is 10 Euro which can be consumed for calls.

On some forums I read that the coverage of simyo is relatively good all over Spain and the data speed is good to excellent.

I have looked into all this because I am also preparing for some weeks in Spain this summer. I’ll go with my 3G cell phone and the recently purchased N800.

I quite like my Nokia E65 which is a small slider phone, offers quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, and 3G (WDCMA2100 in Europe), WiFi (802.11b/g) and bluetooth.

it does have a VOIP (SIP, not SKype) client for internet phone calls, and you can tether it to the nokia tablet over bluetooth /edit/.

data calls on non-specialised contracts are expensive, but T-Mobile generally offers the best deals with "web-n-walk".

your best bet for making cheap internet phone calls is to stay at a hotel which offers free or cheap wifi - Best Western are one of the few hotel chains which do this!

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. I emailed my friend the url for this post. Lots of info to mull over - mind you he doesn't pick up he email very often, but when he does I'll report back his thoughts. Maybe he'll join ITT since the group is so helpful and go with a n800 - we'll see.

Just looking at the suggestions it seems the N8X0 and a cell makes sense though - we'll see!

Cheers

C