Mobile Phone 2 Year Contracts

[BEDROCK]

This is some very useful consumer advice for anyone with a smart phone, never get a 2 year contact.

 

A) because 2 years is a very long time in the mobile phone market and phones are now updated even twice a year

 

B) never be bound to one network provider for that long as you could be wasting a lot of money, switching is best.

 

If you can afford it, save up and buy the handset, pay as you go deals are much better nowadays.

 

If you only ever use your smart phones for games and only brows/text on occasion, then pay as you go is perfectly fine.

[RootsBooster]

This is some very useful consumer advice for anyone with a smart phone, never get a 2 year contact.

 

A) because 2 years is a very long time in the mobile phone market and phones are now updated even twice a year

 

B) never be bound to one network provider for that long as you could be wasting a lot of money, switching is best.

 

If you can afford it, save up and buy the handset, pay as you go deals are much better nowadays.

 

If you only ever use your smart phones for games and only brows/text on occasion, then pay as you go is perfectly fine.

 

I agree with most of this, but even better than pay as you go, you could have a rolling contract (monthly contract, cancel any time you want) which is what I do

[barleycorn]

This is some very useful consumer advice for anyone with a smart phone, never get a 2 year contact.

 

A) because 2 years is a very long time in the mobile phone market and phones are now updated even twice a year

 

B) never be bound to one network provider for that long as you could be wasting a lot of money, switching is best.

 

If you can afford it, save up and buy the handset, pay as you go deals are much better nowadays.

 

If you only ever use your smart phones for games and only brows/text on occasion, then pay as you go is perfectly fine.

 

It really depends on what phone you want and how often you are prepared to keep it for (I had my last phone, a HTC desire, for 3 years).

I have a HTC One which would cost ~£500 to buy, my contract is £33/mnth over 24 months. Over this period the cost of the phone would be ~£21/mnth leaving ~£12/mnth for a pay as you go/rolling contract tariff. Or, in other words, not really a great deal of difference.

 

jb

[Alien52]

Useful advice for all contracts.READ it before you sign it.

[RootsBooster]

It really depends on what phone you want and how often you are prepared to keep it for (I had my last phone, a HTC desire, for 3 years).

I have a HTC One which would cost ~£500 to buy, my contract is £33/mnth over 24 months. Over this period the cost of the phone would be ~£21/mnth leaving ~£12/mnth for a pay as you go/rolling contract tariff. Or, in other words, not really a great deal of difference.

 

jb

 

...apart from the freedom to leave if need be

 

(also, £10 a month gets you 500 minutes, unlimited UK texts & 1GB internet on rolling contract from giffgaff, not bad)

[anywebsite]

It depends which phone you want & what kinds of deals you can get on it. My Nexus 4 was cheaper to buy outright & then get a sim only contract for, it was half the price to buy outright from Google Play compared to similar HTC, Sony, LG & Samsung handsets in the shops at the time. If I wanted a Galaxy S3, at the time it'd have been cheaper to get that on a 2 year contract because the price to buy the phone outright was inflated & there were a lot of deals around for it on contract.

 

GiffGaff don't do rolling contracts, those are prepaid bundle deals.

 

You can get pretty much unlimited everything for under £20 a month on a sim only contract & they start at around £7 a month.

 

The easy way to find out how much your contract phone costs is to compare your contract price with a similar sim only contract price.

 

If you don't use your phone much then of course there's no need to pay for thousands of minutes a month & get the latest top of the range handset.

 

If you do use your phone, then a contract can be a good deal, just make sure that you shop around for the best price every 2 years & don't keep paying for the same phone for longer than you have to, that's where they aim to get you. Know your contract renewal date & make sure you get a new phone and the best deal you can each time.

[Bonjon]

I locked mine back in for 2 years due to what they offer me, on my last renewal I got a Samsung phone (sold for £180 straight away), 100 x-net mins, 500 txt, 1 booster (used for unlimited land lines) and 750 meg of tether data with unlimited browsing (although I have hammered it on tethering and seems to be unlimited everything), all for the large sum of £5 (and a few pence, due to price increase) per month.

 

Now taking into account the phone I sold, T-mobile will have paid me around £60 to be with them