More money than sense.

Mark

I already posted about this in CC's thread.

You pay that much if you go for the 24mth tariff at £35/mth.

I know of someone who bought his directly from italy (i think, where it's illegal to lock phones) for less than half that price. He's staying with his own provider who is charging £20/mth for a better tariff than O2's £35/mth but then he's a long-term customer of said provider.

If I wasn't on a contract now I'd get the PAYG iPhone 3G-S and pay the £10 a month until I got bored of O2 and then unlock it and use it as I please.

In fact I just did a bit of number crunching...

On an 18 month contract the cheapest you pay in total is £803.07 and this gets you the phone and 1350 minutes. That's 1.38 minutes for £1.

On a 24 month contract the cheapest you pay in total is £997.43 and this gets you 14400 minutes. That's 14.44 minutes per £1.

On PAYG you get unlimited data for free for 12 months so I have used a 12 month period to calculate the costs. The cheapest way to go (£10 a month top up) costs £658.30 and gets you 6000 minutes. That's 9.11 minutes per £1. Plus you get £10 a month (i.e. the top up) to spend on text messages which is around 100 texts.

That just doesn't make sense to me. Even paying £30 top up a month it only costs £898.30 and you get more than 150 minutes per £1 and 300 texts and unlimited data?!?!

Why would anyone go for a contract with these PAYG prices?

Because people don't bother to work it out before hand, they see 'Phone: FREE' or a load cheaper and think, "Oooooh! Must be good value".

Only reason I moved to contract was so I didn't have to worry about how much money was left on the phone. I'm just paying £35 a month, and I think I've gone over 1000 texts once? I just like to be able to not worry about how much each call or text is costing me.

thats f***ing stuped!

I’m on a PAYG iPhone, and you don’t have to top up £10 every month, so it can work out much cheaper (after 12 months, yes, £10 per month for the data bolt-on, but it’s free for the first year). I have the plan where calls from a nominated number to a land line or other O2 phone is free. Even though the free minutes last a month (requiring another top-up to get more for the next month), it works out cheaper for me as I work from home and
use my iPhone for calls - most of which cost me nothing now.

The PAYG iPhone looks like a pretty good deal if you are prepared to stump up for the initial phone cost.

True, I wanted to include the £10 a month top up so that you get the free minutes.

Technically you could buy the phone, unlock it and chuck the sim card and you've only paid £540.

Almost exactly what I'm doing next week (don't need to unlock as I've got an iphone already).