Nokia 3510i in Orange Shops

GraniteMum

I do not understand what cashback to your airtime account means in practise. You spend £210 on line rental but is that back to your bank account?

shilcor

I have to say that I'm now very suspicious of these kind of deals. My daughter was with Mobil-One who were supposed to pay back her line rental on a monthly basis. I had used them previously on similar deals and found them to be OK but they went into liquidation owing line rental refunds to lots of their customers including my daughter. We managed to get some of the owed money back after lots of hassle including a complaint to their local Trading Standards Office but she still lost around 70 quid. I read recently that another mobile company has also ceased trading, again failing to pay promised line rental refunds to their customers.
These companies are only "middle men" who get commission to sign you up to a contract with one of the major service providers so your contract is with Vodafone, O2 or whoever, and they then pay some of that commission to you in the form of line rental refunds. If they suddenly decide that they are not going to pay the cashback to you, then that's tough because you are still contracted to pay your line rental directly to your service provider so have no big stick to threaten them with like "give me my cashback or I'll stop paying my line rental".
This deal may well be genuine and the company concerned may be fine but it's worth going into these deals with both eyes open and being aware of the potential risks involved.

Darren21

GraniteMum wrote:

I do not understand what cashback to your airtime account means in practise. You spend £210 on line rental but is that back to your bank account?

The money is paid to your airtime account (i.e. vodafone, o2 etc) NOT your bank account. Therefore this offer in practice -

£70 for 4 months line rental
12 months free line rental through airtime credits
£10 to your bank account for buying online
Referral - £20-60 (depending on special offers)

Therefore the net cost is £60 for 16 months line rental (less any referral money). This is a good deal still if this is what you want, I know some people have said dialaphone aren't that good but they are one of the biggest online & mail order phone sellers (i.e. much less likely to go under than the smaller ones) and I have had about 5 contracts with them, all money paid to my airtime account no probs.

Personally I only deal with carphone warehouse & dialaphone as I feel my money is pretty safe with these 2 companies, any other online company offering great cashback deals - your either going to get a great deal or your gonna lose a fortune!!

pinkonion

I had a dialaphone mobile for years - several different ones on different networks.

The company and their refunds are reliable although this offer isn't on their website (unless I missed it) and does seem a bit too good. My current one is the Nokia 3510i with O2 which has 200x network mins a month and 50 text (both doubled for 1st 3 months). Line rental is £30 - I get £300 Cash back at various stages by redemption and got a tenner for signing up online. Total cost for 1 year = £50. As I already had a perfectly servicable 3510i - I just put the O2 sim card in it and sold the new 3510i (with a freebie O2 sim) for £35. N.B. This was a few weeks ago and just before Orange started selling the 3510i for £19.99

Total cost for a year = £15 or £1.25 per month

GraniteMum

Thanks Darren21, I do not know why the company can not explain it as well as you have!

GimmeGimme_2

Darren21 wrote:

The money is paid to your airtime account (i.e. vodafone, o2 etc) NOT your bank account.

Are you 100% sure on this. I had a phone from dialaphone 18 months ago which I think stated that but I got the money into my bank account.

Darren21

Yep 200% sure -

12 MONTHS FREE LINE RENTAL

Your 12 months FREE line rental are available as cashback by redemption to your airtime account in 3 stages; £70 at month 4, £70 at month 8 and £70 at month 12.

Dialaphone do lots of different deals - some to your bank a/c and some to your airtime a/c & also at different months. Most of the best deals are redemption to airtime a/c.

bugs

I've asked at my local shop for the Phillips which is out of stock and discontinued but which they may possibly receive this afternoon.

Also asked whether they were definitely new phones and was told yes.