Mobile Phones

One of your first decisions when choosing a mobile phone is do you want to pay for calls as you make them [Pay as you go] or do you want to buy a bundle of airtime minutes, text messages and data [contract]. This decision is primarily based on how much you use your phone. If you are a heavy phone user then a contract is definitely for you. The decision for a medium to light user used to be simple – go for a pay as you go, but increasingly phone companies trying to tie individuals down to contracts are offering very competitive bundles a very low monthly charges. These type of offers often have unlimited or a very large amount of texts trying to convert the younger population onto contracts from prepay. The UK mobile phone market is traditionally mostly a contract based market. Other countries for example Italy are the other way round. Another recent trend to be aware of in the mobile phone market is to offer 18 month instead of the usual 12 month contract. Here you get a better call package or a better phone by choosing a longer contract but remember 18 months is a long time in the phone industry.
 
Children are increasingly getting mobile phones as a way for their parents to keep a tab on what they are doing. Here a prepay phone is often a good choice. Firstly it limits the amount they can spend as you only charge the phone (known as top-ups) with what you are happy with your child getting. Also, it teaches your child a kind of money management as if they use up all their credit in the first week of the month and can only get incoming calls for the rest of the month they will think more carefully on their usage.
 
They next major decision is the type of phone you want. To decide think about the functionality you require. Obviously you want to make calls but in general the more functions the phone has the less good it is as a simple phone – one of the iPhone’s least impressive features is actually making calls. Aside from just making calls think about if are you going send a lot of text messages, do you need email, a good calendar, a MP3 player or walkman, do you need a good camera? Very few phones do everything well but there are a number of phones that do two or more things well. Sony for example make excellent camera phones, they also make excellent music player phones. Blackberry makes the best email phone. Nokia make the best web surfing phones and were responsible for the first smart phone the Nokia communicator. If you do plan to buy a smart phone then you should definitely opt for a 3G one.