Shiny new phone
By the end of last year I had had my phone for 2 years and had been thinking about a replacement. I was quite happy with what I had on the whole - a Sharp GX15 - it was very small, had all the important (and not so important features), like a camera, colour screen, GPRS, bluetooth etc. The main problem with it was terrible battery life - it would only just last a day if I didn't make any calls. This had already led to some difficult times expiring at an important time. Obviously it should run for more than that, but when I'd sent it back Vodafone had taken several weeks to do nothing more than put a sticker on the battery saying it tested OK, without fixing the problem so since then I had just been living with the inconvenience.
For a while I was quite tempted by taking up the Virgin Mobile SIM only offer they are doing for NTL customers. £10/month for 200 minutes - a very good deal - however I would have to find a phone which would mean buying a bare unlocked phone (very expensive) or a Virgin pay-as-you-go (still quite pricey).
Then I saw the 3 X-Series website. When you dig through all the flashy stuff you find that what they are offering is something quite new and attractive. The X-Series silver service, for £5 extra on top of your standard contract, gives you 1GByte/month of internet access. They pre-load your phone with various applications and settings to help you use it but what it comes down to is that you can basically use as much data as you like (using 1GB should be quite hard on a mobile at max 384kbits/s) for a fiver. When you compare it with any other network it just pisses all over them. Vodafone is about the best value otherwise at £2.50 per Mbyte, 500 times as expensive. The difference really is staggering.
The only limitation is that the only phone they offer this on is the Nokia N73 - but that's not much of a hardship as it's a nice little (well OK not so little compared to the GX15) phone. Apparently if you have another phone from 3 you can talk them into giving you the X-series service if you try hard - not all the bundled apps run but you get the important bit.
So I ended up with an N73 for free (well £1.95 admin fee) with
- 300 minutes
- 1000 texts
- 50 MMS messages
- 50 minutes video
- £5 downloads
- X-Series silver
for £22.50/month for 8 months and £40/month for the next 10.Of course when I transferred my phone number from Vodafone they wanted to know why I was leaving. So I told them. Perhaps if 3 get enough takers for this the other networks will pay attention - although I think they'll need to extend it to a few other phones first before their other customers get too annoyed that N73 owners get a staggeringly better deal than everyone else who's paying £5/month just for an email add-on for example.
More posts coming up on my experiences with it.
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