So the cheapest deal to come with a free iPhone is £50 per month.
I'm glad I went for HTC then. What a rip off.

What reception issue? Picked up mine today; I get a better O2 signal on it than I do on the 3G it replaces, and slightly bizarrely, a better WiFi signal than I do on my iPad. Perfectly happy so far.



But there's no such thing as a 'free' phone - just a varying amount of subsidy from the carrier. And with many tariffs from competing providers publishing their prices openly and freely, there's no suggestion that anyone is being 'ripped-off' - we're all grown-ups; clearly we can choose to buy or not.

Pete

Hold it "wrongly" does the signal drop?

Mine disappears completely.

Still waiting for the software update, anyone heard any news on when that will be?

1. You're probably in a low signal area where many other phones would suffer similarly on the same network.
2. There is surgery available to correct your faulty hand.

<Indian accent> Ooh that is very interesting sir </

You're terrible at accents JJ, that sounded more Welsh than Indian.

LMFAO it always does, unless I'm trying to do Welsh

I think it's because I'm Cornish, init?

Nope, not even when it's out of it's case.

It could be a clean hands issue. Try cleaning your hands.

I wash my hands all the time.

OK, to keep you happy I've just done an experiment. Did a surgery style scrub of my hands with washing up liquid then took the excess water off with a brand new, never used before tea towel and dried them by wafting them in the air until they were completely dry.

The phone was lying on my desk with 3 bars of 3G signal.

I picked it up and held it in my left hand as though using it to type with my right index finger.

Within 15 seconds the signal indicator brought up the message "Searching..."

I'm off to town tomorrow so I might kick up a fuss in the Orange shop and see what they can do.

OK, just tried it outside (away from my wifi etc...) and turned off the wifi so that I could see the 3G signal.

The signal went up to 5 bars when I was holding it without touching the sides. Then I held it touching the bottom left edge and within 30 seconds it went to "Searching..." again.

Tried to do it again to catch it on video and it kept dropping to 1 bar but didn't lose the signal altogether.

Sigh, I wish that were real. I have to make do with boring the pants of PC World sales people.

Go and talk to the old biddies in the charity shops, they'd happily listen to you all day. They probably know more about gadgets than your average PC World salesperson anyway.

PC World salespeople deserve all the suffering you can give them