Mobile Phone thread - please include links to good deals

[Extra Terrestrial]

I have a fairly basic question to ask:

If I happen to buy a cheap pay-as-you-go phone from Carphone Warehouse, can I just simply pop my current SIM card into the phone and carry on making calls and sending messages straight off the bat?

Or is there an activation process involved?

Thank you to whoever helps!

[funkydan]

If you buy a pay-as-you-go from CW, it will actually be cheaper to buy it with a PAYG sim as I discovered when getting one for my mum. Provided the phone is not tied to any network, you buy it, with a sim that you have to put a minimum of £10 credit on. Take it home and stick your sim into it. Then save the other SIM as a spare. They'll charge you more if you purchase a PAYG phone without a SIM, true story!

[Pavey]

Ask any more questions you have. I've had it for months now so know a lot about it I think. Hope that's helped.

Hi mate. Got it today, really impressed so far. Forgot how logical Nokia's are

You don't use a Mac do you? Can't for the life of me get it to sync with iSync

What do you know? Been trying all bleedin' day, post that above, and it works

[Alastair]

Glad it's sorted, I'm PC anyway so couldn't have helped.

[JP]

Just been announced: https://interest.orange.co.uk/default.aspx

[fishbowlhead]

Just been announced: https://interest.orange.co.uk/default.aspx

And hopefully with it O2's utterly ridiculous iphone tariffs will die a welcome death. Unless orange adopt the same trumped up tariffs just because its the iphone, who knows, hopefully orange treat it as any other phone tariff wise, though i expect yowl still have to pay for the phone when you take out a contract.

[JP]

Aren't these things controlled by Apple rather than O2 though? That's what I'd always thought anyway.

[fishbowlhead]

As far as im aware, O2 charge so much on the tariff and give so little because apple take a cut out of the tariff profits too. With the exclusiveness now ended, apple no longer get a cut from the tariff profits from either O2 or Orange.

[ChrisF]

From what I've read so far, the prices are expected to be similar on Orange.

[JP]

Announced by Vodafone today: http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-phone/iphone-3gs

[jamesy]

Does anyone know if there are any nice flip phones that have been released in the UK within the past year or so? I'm thinking of those big rectangle ones that seem to be popular in Japan. Sliding phones just don't do it for me and I don't want an iphone.

[Scythe]

I just got one of these on Friday and I can't begin to explain how much I love it.

Another vote for the HTC Hero, had it a week or so now and I love it, so intuitive. Only down side is the camera, great in good light, poor in any other condition.

[saif]

Just wanting to get my first phone in the UK for a long time and you guys seem up on all that stuff...especially in this thread.

I have o2 broadband so anything on o2 will give me a £5 pcm saving on that so I am obviously leaning towards that.
I want something cheap and don't want anything flashy, battery intensive or too big. Unfortunately, I would also like something kind of good too.

Ideally, I would want
The ability to type text easily (not text length) so that I could type, say blog posts, in the commuting time I have.
Ability to read and write Japanese (ideally using the numerical keypad style)
Wi-fi to act as a remote for a music server

Not particularly bothered by media stuff but all phones do that anyway, right?

I was leaning towards a nokia 5530 but I cannot see whether it does japanese or is any good for typing on.
Any ideas?

[Skull Commander]

Any of you chaps got any experience with the Blackberry Bold 9700? I fancy making the smartphone jump, but I'm generally clueless on the subject.

[Adrock]

Missus has one, really likes it. She hasnt done much media related and the standard blackberry browser is poor but Opera mobile is available on blackberry.

The keyboard is very good. She also has a facebook app for it, which she uses far too much.