Any contract phones (with a free iPod touch) with decent buttons?

ianpwilliams

I'm looking to get a new phone, on a contract, with the following:

Free "gift" - iPod Touch 4th Gen

Java-enabled, for playing Java games

Bluetooth for transferring Java games across from the PC

Large buttons, or spaced buttons, because I have big hands and fingers!

Low line rental i.e. as close to £10/month as possible (I'm happy to pay an upfront cost for the handset)

I know I'm not going to get a brilliant phone with that list of requirements, but at the moment I can't find anything that fulfils all the criteria. Although the actual problem is the buttons/keypad. So far I found the following:

Samsung E1080T
Nokia 1616
Samsung E1170
Nokia C1-02
Nokia C2-01

So I went into town and checked them out in the shops, and they are all fiddly when it comes to the buttons (either very small, or right next to each other, or flimsy, or a combination).

While I was in town I saw the:

Samsung B2710

which is a great phone. It's really tough and rugged, and the buttons are great. But the only deal I can find on that which comes with an iPod Touch is £20/month.

So my question is, does anyone know of any basic phones that come with an iPod Touch, that are around £10/month, that have decent buttons? It's annoying because I'm prepared to pay quite a bit up-front, as long as I can keep the line rental down.

Tony5101

If you're willing to pay quite a bit upfront for the phone - why not just purchase the iPod Touch instead - then get a cheap phone/contract?

Lets face it - any phone that is offered with a £10p/m tariff is going to retail at £50-80 at most - coupled with the allowances.... I would be absolutely amazed if you get an iPod thrown in for that sort of money.
£240 over 24 months minus phone cost doesn't leave a huge amount for allowances let alone "free" gifts.

grumbler

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/mobile-phones/brands/samsung/b2710/

£10 a month? This is just enough to pay for the airtime. Why would any network pay a big commission (exceeding the cost of iPod) for attracting a customer paying just £10p.m.? You have to be more realistic.

As a side note, such deals with 'gifts' are usually very poor: Mobile with free laptop

ianpwilliams

Well when I say quite a bit...most of the phones on those tariffs are £60 at most, but the iPod Touch is around £165. So it's £100 difference. That and I wouldn't feel right splashing out £165 for an iPod Touch. I would feel less guilty spending so much on a gadget like that if it was done in a roundabout way.

ianpwilliams

I agree that some (if not most) of those "free gift" deals are bad (certainly any laptop you get is going to be bad). But I don't think that all of them are bad. If I compare my iPod Touch deal with the cheapest contract you can generally get:

Samsung E1080T contract with free iPod Touch

£10.50/month over 24 months = £252
Handset = £25
Total Upfront Cost = £35
Monthly Cost = £10.50
Total Paid = £277

iPod Touch brand new on its own, and a the cheapest possible phone contract

iPod Touch = £165
£7.50/month over 24months = £180
Handset = £0
Total Upfront Cost - £172.50
Monthly Cost = £7.50
Total Paid = £345

So in this case you actually pay £68 less if you go for the "free" iPod Touch option. Ok you could argue that you could probably get a shorter contract if buying the iPod Touch separately, but you would probably get the same amount of minutes and texts, and the same basic level of phone, from what I've seen.

grumbler

Well, I have to admit that your figures look convincing.
When I said 'poor' about the laptop, I didn't mean poor laptop. I meant a poor deal, i.e. a high resulting price you pay for a cheap laptop.

ianpwilliams

Yeah, I think they seem ok. No doubt though that most of these deals are nowhere near as good as they might seem though. The only question left is whether the companies who have the offers are actually any good. But I'm guessing most of them would be.

Humphrey10

What model of iPod Touch is it? Just check you're comparing like with like, and make sure you are getting enough storage - an 8 GB one would be totally worthless for me (my 32 GB iPhone only has 6 GB left), but if all you are storing on it was music it would probably be enough.

ianpwilliams

It's always an 8GB, 4th Generation one. But that's the one I was looking at anyway, whichever way I go. I wold only ever listen to music on it, and play the odd game.

I must admit it would be better to be able to buy one up front, currently £150, which is a bit better than £165 at least. And it would be nice to know that I owned it straight away, rather than after 2 years. It may be better to just sell some stuff and do that instead. But I haven't decided either way yet.

The other thing I wondered is, once the next generation of iPod Touch comes out, how long does it take for the price of the previous generation to go down? Because maybe I could wait until iPod Touch 5th Gen comes out, although I'm not sure when that is.

Humphrey10

I'd expect the price of 4th gen to drop as soon as 5th gen is released, so if you can wait, do.

I've just had a quick look at the top paid games top 10 chart on the app store - file sizes (in MB) are 16, 100, 23, 139, 16, 299, 18, 584, 13, 18. So if you were just to download the top 10, that's over 1/8th of your storage gone already, and don't forget that the operating system and pre-installed apps will also take up space.

ianpwilliams

Yeah it seems that iPod Touch next-gens are usually anouced and released in Sept, so maybe any day now...?

As for space, unfortunately 4th Gen only has 8GB/32GB (no 16GB), so quite a difference. Maybe I should wait for 5th gen release.