Archive for the ‘How to Guides’ Category
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Introduction
The high cost of a top-end smartphone, whether paid up front or spread out over a 24 month contract, is causing many smartphone owners to turn to insurance to protect their investment. After all, it makes sense to spend a small amount of money to obviate a large amount of risk, right?
Well, sometimes. Even if you believe in the value of insurance it’s difficult to figure out which of the myriad plans available is the best for you. While you can have a look at insurance comparison websites, these can often be overly reductive and ignore many viable options.
In this article, we’ll examine the possibilities and help you figure out the option that works best for you.
No Insurance: No Monthly Cost, No Protection
It’s entirely possible that you can get by without phone insurance. If you’ve never lost or damaged a phone in years of owning one, you’ve purchased a good case for your phone, and you don’t travel into areas with high crime, then you might not need insurance at all.
This is especially true for pay-as-you-go customers, as losing your phone can only result in your remaining credit being used; it is impossible for further fraudulent charges to be applied.
For contract customers, this possibility can be one of the strongest reasons that you should invest in insurance of this kind; to make sure that hundreds of pounds of further charges can’t be accrued. If you do lose your phone and you don’t have insurance, contact your mobile operator immediately to prevent fraudulent use. You’ll still have to pay out the rest of your contract, but at least you can get your SIM card replaced fairly inexpensively (if not for free) to use in an old phone.
If you have lost phones before, even from accidental damage or theft, then you may be at greater risk for losing your phone in the future. In this case, you’ll probably want to examine one of the other options presented below. The same is true if you’re a contract customer, as you’ll want to avoid potential fraudulent use if someone finds or steals your phone.
Self Insurance: As Much Protection As You Put In
An unusual half-way house between no insurance and insurance is so-called “self insurance.” In this case, you can voluntarily put some money each month into a high interest savings account.
This self-imposed financial backup will allow you to ensure you can afford to buy a new phone if your original is lost or damaged, although of course you won’t be actually paying any more or less than if you had no insurance at all. If you don’t need to ‘claim’, then you can simply transfer the money and the interest back into your primary account.
To determine how much you should set aside each month, have a look at the replacement costs, typically the cost of the phone. If you’re close to the end of your contract, it’s possible to negotiate a new phone by signing a new deal.
Home Contents Insurance: A Risky, Low Cost Option You Might Already Have
A tempting insurance option is to cover your mobile phone using your existing home contents insurance. Your mobile phone may already be covered, so if you have home contents insurance you should check to see if this is the case. If your smartphone isn’t covered by your policy, then you may be able to add it by paying an additional premium, increasing the total price by perhaps £25 per year.
This sounds like a pretty good deal, but there is one major drawback: If you do lose your phone and claim it on insurance, then you lose your no-claims discount for the entire account. This means that you will likely lose more than the claim is worth on future rate increases, making this a tenuous option.
Another problem is that the cost of the phone may not be entirely covered, as you will likely have to pay an excess. Hopefully this will be a small amount (less than £30) but higher amounts are quite possible. It’s also likely that you will not be able to have your phone replaced as quickly as more specialised services, which we will cover later. Finally, your phone might be replaced, or you might have its cash value returned — but beware, this can be the retail price, market price, or price of network replacement.
Packaged Bank Accounts: A Low Cost Alternative You Might Already Have
Another type of insurance that you may already have comes from your packaged bank account. Usually this mobile phone protection is one the major selling points of a packaged bank account, but it’s worth checking your current account just to make sure – you don’t want to be paying for mobile phone insurance twice.
Otherwise, packaged bank accounts can be a good option, but it’s always important to read the small print and make sure the excess is not excessive and the terms are favourable.
Mobile Provider Insurance: Well Suited, But Can Be Expensive
Another popular insurance option is to receive insurance from your mobile provider themselves. All of the major operators (T-Mobile, Orange, O2, Vodafone and 3) offer insurance, so have a look at your network provider’s offerings on their official website.
If you’re on one of the many virtual operators, it’s more of a mixed bag – giffgaff and Tesco Mobile both use O2′s networks, but giffgaff don’t offer insurance.
If your provider does offer insurance, then it can often be a fairly good deal, and you can be assured that the replacement that you receive will work well on their networks. These deals often have good replacement time frames as well, typically offering replacement with 24 to 48 hours.
Still, there can be better options available – as with any insurance policy, calculate the excess and the monthly price to figure out how much you would save by replacing your phone after a year of payments. Also, be sure that you register the phone properly, giving serial and IMEI numbers where appropriate – you really don’t want to find out later that you didn’t get around to it.
Stand-Alone Insurance: Competitive Prices, Customised Protection
The final and usually most competitive option is that of specialised mobile phone insurance. This insurance is typically quite good value, offering extra coverage such as worldwide theft, breakdown, liquid and accidental damage.
The amount you pay each month can depend on the phone that you own, so if you have a particularly expensive or cheap phone then it can be advantageous to spend some time shopping around to get the best policy; expensive phones can be covered under cover-all rates, where as cheaper phones could be best insured on sites that base the monthly cost on the model of the phone. Generally the iPhone can be the most expensive phone to get insured, so you’ll want to find an insurer that doesn’t force you to pay an extra premium.
Another benefit of stand-alone insurance is that you can typically add additional mobile phones to the same plan relatively inexpensively, making getting your entire family insured quite convenient.
Overall, this can be the best option if you’re not already covered by your bank or mobile operator.
Conclusion (TL; DR)
There are quite a few insurance options available, but hopefully this article will have gone some way towards simplifying the matter at hand. The key advice is this:
- Don’t get insurance if you don’t need it — if you don’t lose phones as a rule, then you’ll probably spend more money on insurance than you would on replacing your phone.
- If you do need it, first check to see if you’re already covered by your bank or home contents insurance.
- If you’re not covered, stand-alone insurance can often be a great starting point, usually offering low prices and the most comprehensive coverage. Another good alternative is coverage from your mobile provider.
- Finally, always shop around and read the fine print — there’s a lot more to insurance than money in, money out — check to make sure that the excesses are reasonable and everything you need is covered.
What Do You Think?
I hope this was a useful article. If you’ve found a particularly good deal or would like share your experiences with mobile insurance, please feel free to let us know!
Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
So you went ahead and bought a smartphone. Why? because it has so many functions that it’s like the Swiss Army Knife of the digital age. But what if these functions themselves are the reason why your handset can’t stand a full day on a single charge? Common answers around the web direct you to disable your GPS, change the network to 2G or GSM from 3G, stop listening to music on the loudspeaker, and avoid chatrooms and constant emailing. If that’s right then why would I buy a smartphone when there are plain vanilla phones available at half the price?
This led me to start a quest for workarounds that would let me enjoy a beautiful smartphone experience without any painful ‘Battery Empty’ notifications. Here are the fruits of that quest – wisdom to keep your smartphone juiced up.
1. Keep your cool phone cool
Never leave your phone is direct sunlight or near a heat source. Heat is the number one culprit when it comes to dying batteries.
2. Firmware Updates
Though the tip is universal it holds particularly for Symbian devices. Symbian firmware updates usually have battery performance as it’s number one priority – probably because there’s nothing much to work with that OS.
3. Love GPS modules
Get yourself a bluetooth GPS module like the Motorola MotoNav SIRF 3 gps module. Bluetooth only sips through battery power and when you use an external Bluetooth GPS module for lengthy navigation you actually shift a lot of processing strain from the phone to the module, thus making huge savings on battery life.
4. Get an alternative power source charger
You could go for a mobile phone car charger if you’re someone who carpools or have your own car. Otherwise you could go for a Nexus Battery Pack or a Solar charger depending on your lifestyle. The Nexus battery pack comes with a whopping 2 Amperes of storage cased in a slick black case. I recommend it.
5. Go hands-free
Again there may be nay-sayers who target the Bluetooth wasting power. But I have personally achieved much better uptime for my phone using a Bluetooth headset than without. Moreover, since you’re already using the technology for your GPS module you might as well make the most of it. Make sure to shop for good BT headsets as some are more power efficient than others. My personal favorite is the Sony Ericsson MW600 – it features the ability to pair with 3 devices at a time giving you a lot of flexibility if you’re a gadget freak like me.
6. Power User?
If you’re a power user who makes the most of everything that your phone offers, or if you’re a Nokia N900 user, then I’d suggest installing a battery monitor that tracks your power usage to specific apps so that you can use only the more efficient ones.
7. Transfer data through the USB
Most modern smartphones support charging through USB cables. If you need to transfer files to your computer use the the USB instead of WiFi or Bluetooth. Not only will the transfer be faster but you’ll gain charge instead of losing it.
Don’t just be a smartphone user, be a smart user.
Friday, July 29th, 2011
You might have noticed we’ve been posting a lot of stories about the Samsung Galaxy S2 recently. There’s good reason for that, as the S2 has been one of the fastest selling Android phones ever, quickly racking up five million sales. And that’s without having launched in the US yet! One thing we haven’t covered yet, and we feel we should, is how to actually get the best deal on a Samsung Galaxy S2 itself.
The first decision you have to make is whether to go with a contract or a pay-as-you-go option.
The contract will typically allow you to have a much lower upfront cost (as low as the first monthly bill) and you’re also sure to enjoy slightly better value for things like minutes, texts and internet allowances, although it’s likely that at some point you won’t use up all of your allowance, or go over it. Most mobile phone contracts are 18 or 24 months, meaning that you will have to keep your phone (and your plan) for quite some time, giving you less freedom in the long term. Finally, contracts are the most expensive over the long term.
The pay-as-you-go option has a very high upfront cost, as you’ll typically have to purchase the phone outright (or at a small discount) from your mobile provider. Once you’ve got the phone, you’ll be paying less each month (as you only need to buy as much credit as you use), but you’ll be receiving slightly worse value for money: £30 spent on a month of contract will usually get you a lot more than £30 spent on minutes, texts and internet individually. There are some good deals that nullify this, to some degree. The big advantage of the pay-as-you-go option is that you have much more freedom. You get to choose precisely how to spend your money, whether on minutes, texts or internet allowance, to suit your own usage patterns. You can even pay to have your phone unlocked and then switch providers.
It’s also possible to take a 12 month contract. These middle-of-the-road deals offer a lower (but still significant) upfront cost but a higher monthly rate. The advantage of the 12 month contract is the cost is spread out more evenly across the year, and you’re free to upgrade your phone or switch to a cheaper contract after a year, which seems a much more reasonable amount of time than two.
Now that we’ve laid out the trade-offs, let’s have a look at some specific deals for the Samsung Galaxy S2, starting with the contract deals. We’ll look at the best contract deals currently available for each price point, then move onto how to check for the latest deals using comparison websites, and what to look for.
Best Contract Deals
Here are some of the best contract deals on a Samsung Galaxy S2 currently available. These deals are changing all the time, so if you’ve spotted a better one then please let us know in the comments section!
Best Deal for £20: Vodafone Your Plan MI
£20.50 / month, 24 months, handset costs £69.
This plan is the cheapest contract deal I’ve found for the Galaxy S2, as you’ll save £10 off the normal price each month for all 24 months of the contract. For just over £20 a month, you’ll get 300 minutes, 3000 texts, and 250 MB of internet allowance.
The allowances are low, but reasonable for someone that makes calls infrequently. If you spend much of your time in a home or office with wireless internet, 250 MB of mobile internet allowance should be fine, but you will have to monitor your usage.
You do have to pay for the handset, but still have upfront costs of under £90, which is pretty good considering the low monthly price. Overall, this is an incredibly attractive deal for value-oriented consumers.
Click here to view more details and buy this contract.
Best Deal for £25: Three Internet Texter 900
£26.00 / month, 24 months, handset is £19.99
This text-based plan is quite generous, with 900 minutes and 5000 texts in your monthly usage allowance.
You also get a great 1 GB data allowance, which should be more than enough for even the most avid smartphone enthusiasts. You’ll also get free Skype-to-Skype calls, free Windows Live Messenger usage, and free voicemail.
This deal seems fairly good, particularly if you’re a big user of Skype or Windows Live messenger (aka MSN).
Click here to view more details and buy this contract.
Best Deal for £30: Voda Essentials £31
£31.00 / month, 24 months, handset is £49.99
This Vodafone plan offers 1200 minutes and unlimited texts, but doesn’t mention mobile internet. This means that it’s likely to be the smallest common allowance, 250 MB.
Even so, this contract sports a fairly low up-front cost and good value.
Click here to view more details and buy this contract.
Best Deal for £35: Vodafone Your Plan MI
£36.00 / month, 12 months, handset costs £99.
This is a rare example of a decently priced 12 month contract, this time from Vodafone. You’re given a 500 MB data allowance, 300 minutes and 300 texts. Overage charges are quite high however, with calls beyond your allowance being charged at 35p a minute (compared with the more common 20p or 25p).
Still, this is a good opportunity to break free after 12 months, and provides a nice half-way house between a low up-front cost and the ability to make a fairly quick exit.
For reference, the 24 month variant of this plan costs £33.50 a month and includes 500 minutes instead of 300, as well as the standard free phone. Total cost for the 12 month plan is £531, the total cost of the 24 month plan is £804.
Click here to view more details and buy this contract.
Best Deal for £40: Orange Panther 45
£40.00 / month, 24 months, handset is free.
The plan will be more than enough for even the busiest talker*, with 1200 minutes (20 hours) of call credit and 3000 texts. This is definitely one of the most expensive plans available, but you do get quite a lot for it. Beyond the aforementioned minutes and texts, you also get a generous 1GB usage limit (more than enough for strictly mobile use, and doesn’t include email use) and free use of the answering phone.
This contract is definitely on the less desirable end of the value scale, and is included more for reference than actual use. It works out to being a whopping £960 over the 24 months, more than double the upfront cost of the phone itself.
Click here to view more details and buy this contract.
*If you’re really concerned this might not enough, you could try one of O2′s unlimited deals for £62 a month… and possibly some other hobbies!
How to Choose a Good Contract Deal
There are also quite a few useful contract comparison websites which you can use to look at deals from multiple networks and retailers. The two I’ve used are omio.com and phones4u.com, but others are available too.
BillMonitor.com is an excellent resource for choosing the right plan based on your actual usage habits; given your login details it can check your usage patterns and advise you as to which plan would give you the best value.
Finally, you can also apply the standard array of discounts and vouchers to get better deals or money back. One good site for this is QuidCo.com, which offers money back offers on a wide range of products, including smartphones like the Galaxy S2.
Using these resources, you now must judge each deal as its presented. It’s a good idea to write things down on a bit of paper (real or virtual) as you go along, so you can get a clearer idea of the various deals, as there will be different ones between comparison websites. Remember to ensure that your plan fits your usage habits, so don’t pay extra for a plan that has unlimited texts if you only use a few dozen a month. You’ll be stuck with your choice for up to two years, so take the time to find the best deal!
If you’ve found a particularly good deal for the Samsung Galaxy S2, why not share it with us by leaving the details in the comments below? If it’s a top deal, we’ll add it to the article!
Best Pay-As-You-Go Deals
Here are some of the best pay-as-you-go deals on a Samsung Galaxy S2 currently available. These deals are changing all the time, so if you’ve spotted a better one then please let us know in the comments section!
O2: £479.99
Three: £499.99
Vodafone: £509.90
Orange: £509.90
You can also buy a sim-free Samsung Galaxy S2, often for cheaper than locked to a given network. Once you’ve got your sim-free phone, you may want to check out the new and popular pay-as-you go operator GiffGaff. They offer surprisingly good deals, frequently with unlimited texts and internet allowances.
Conclusion
I hope this has been a useful article! Be sure to let us know if you’ve found any great deals in the comments section. You can also write to us on Facebook or Twitter.
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
Smartphones are getting more and more powerful by the year but unfortunately this just isn’t something that’s reflected in battery power yet; generally speaking, you’re lucky if your battery lasts longer than a day. So it is with the HTC Desire S, whose battery only lasts for around 12-14 hours when used normally.
There are a few ways to deal with this; you can ensure that you carry your HTC Desire S charger with you wherever you go, and invest in an HTC Desire S car charger, so that whenever there’s an electricity outlet or a car cigarette lighter nearby you know you’ll be able to top yourself up. Or you can do what I did and pick up an emergency charger, which slips into your bag and is perfect for times like festivals when you know you won’t be able to access an electricity socket for a while.
Another option which will keep your phone running for longer on a daily basis is the Mugen HTC Desire S Extended Battery, which boasts 1800mAh of power – an extra 350mAh up on the 1450mAh contained in the standard HTC Desire S battery. Although the Extended Battery is bigger in battery size, physically it’s exactly the same, so it fits into your handset perfectly and won’t add any extra weight or bulk. That also means you won’t need to upgrade any cases or covers you use for your device; your current HTC Desire S cover will still fit fine.
Mugen HTC Desire S Extended Battery - 1800mAh
A variety of other HTC Desire S accessories are available on the main website.
Tags: extended batteries, Extended Battery, HTC Desire S, htc desire s accessories, HTC Desire S batteries, HTC Desire S battery, HTC Desire S car charger, HTC Desire S car chargers, htc desire s case, HTC Desire S cases, HTC Desire S charger, HTC Desire S chargers, HTC Desire S cover, HTC Desire S covers, HTC Desire S emergency charger, HTC Desire S emergency chargers, HTC Desire S extended batteries, HTC Desire S extended battery,
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Monday, December 6th, 2010
Last week I took a look at the different tariffs available for two of the most popular smartphones – the HTC Desire HD and iPhone 4. This week, following the launch of the iPad on Three, Orange and T-Mobile, I thought I’d do the same for the iPad – but instead of comparing it to a competitor, (of which there are very few) I thought I’d compare the different buying options – signing up for a year contract and getting the iPad subsidised or buying it outright and using it with a Sim Only iPad Contract or portable Wi-Fi dongle.
There are a number of obvious benefits to taking out the iPad on contract, the main one being that you won’t have to hand over as much cash up front in order to get one, but the general feedback floating around the web is that the price plans are just too expensive compared to the Sim Only option.
I was quite surprised to find that when you sit down and do the maths that this isn’t always the case, and that in most cases, the contract option is the most cost effective way of running an iPad.
If you want to take a look at the table in full, you can download an excel version, where you’ll be able to tweak it depending on the deals that you find when you start shopping around for your next phone.
On the table below, the left section is for the iPad on a 2 year contract, the section on the right is for buying an iPad outright and using a Sim Only deal on a rolling 30 day contract over a 2 year period. iPad prices are based on Apple’s RRP, and are for the 3G + Wifi Version.
iPad Tariff Comparison
What about Mi-Fi?
Good question. For those of you that have looked into Mobile Broadband recently, you’ll have spotted that most networks now do a Mobile Broadband Dongle that creates a portable Wi-Fi network. These little gadgets are great as they allow you to use multiple devices on the same connection – including iPads. It would be unfair of me to not include this in the comparison for iPad as they do provide another way to run an iPad. Instead of buying the 3G enabled iPad, you can simply get the Wi-Fi only version and connect to the internet when you need to using your Mi-Fi dongle.
There are a few drawbacks to this, the main one being that data obviously won’t download in the background. This means no push notifications, no push email, no calendar sync and no online gaming unless you’ve got the dongle switched on and connected. For those of you who use your iPad a lot, this will be a big issue, but for casual users it’s worth considering.
WiFi Only iPad and Mi-Fi Dongle Comparison
I’ve added a chart to the spreadsheet that shows the total cost of ownership for an iPad + MiFi. O2 are the only network not to do them and are therefore missing from the chart. To keep things fair, all prices are based on running the contract over a 2 year period, the same as the iPad contract deals, however the actual contract term varies from 1 – 24 months.
How this works
Line Rental and Handset cost.
These two rows are all pretty straight forward. To keep this chart as fair as possible, these prices are all based on the current prices listed on the network websites and are correct as of today (6th Dec). You may be able to find discounted deals with independent retailers, but as the iPad is so popular, I wouldn’t expect to find many discounts.
Data Allowances.
Again, they’re fairly straight forward, but as some networks offer a number of different tariffs at the same price point I’ve opted for tariffs that give similar allowances.
The Off-Peak data offered by Orange and T-Mobile can only be used between midnight and 10am.
Data allowance is quoted in GB.
Effective Monthly Cost (EMC)
This is where it may start to get a bit confusing. The Effective Monthly Cost is the fairest way to compare how much each option will cost you each month. The Effective Monthly Cost is calculated by adding up the total cost of your line rental and the cost of the iPad and dividing it by the contract period. This makes it a little easier to compare deals that are over different time periods (ie 18/24m).
Unlike last week’s comparison, there are no discounts included from cashback sites or network discounts as I can’t find any as yet for the iPad, presumably due to it not needing any incentives to sell.
Value
It’s not always easy to look at a set of tariffs and work out which ones are good value for money, so that’s where this figure will help you. To determine the value figure I awarded points to each tariff for GB of data that you get. I then divided this number by the total cost of ownership (TCO) to get a value for money figure. To a certain extent, how this is calculated doesn’t matter too much as no matter how it’s calculated the result is the same. What is important though is that the lower this number is the better as it means you’re getting more for your money.
You’ll notice that the Value for Money figure on the contract iPad deals is a lot lower than that of the sim only deal. This means that you get less for your money by opting to go down the sim only route. In most cases you’ll get less data included each month, but having said that, you’re not tied in to a long contract and are free to stop using it at any point.
Green tariffs are good value for money, amber tariffs are ok, but nothing special, and red ones should be avoided at all costs!
So Which is the best deal?
There’s no definitive answer to this question, but what the chart should help you decide on is which networks are worth spending more time looking at and which ones to avoid.
Based on the information above though, the best deals that you can get on the iPad are with Three. They provide greater value for money as you get loads more data included, regardless of whether you opt for the contract or sim free option. Personally I’d suggest taking it out on a contract. Even though you’d be paying £10 a month more than you would for the sim only deal, the total cost of ownership over a 2 year period is £90 less than buying the same sized iPad outright and using a £15 iPad Sim only deal. (Based on the 16GB model).
Download and Experiment
If you understand all that and want to have a play with the spreadsheet yourself, feel free to download a copy of it in XLS format. There’s a bit less colour coding on it and you’ll notice that there are also a few extra rows in each table. I won’t go into detail on what these are on here, but you’ll find explanations on the first tab of the spreadsheet.
If you have any questions or want me to put one of these together for any other phones, let me know using the comments section below or message me on Twitter.
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