PAYG v Contract - light use

little_miss_messiah

Hi

Just wondering is there an easy comparison site that tells you if you're better off on PAYG or contract?

OH is a S/E carpenter and has a works mobile on 02, they have shared between 3 1500 minutes and only pay about 12.50 a month each. His RAZR was involved in an unfortuante building site accident and the front screen is cracked but the phone still works ok. This is now out of contract, but obv they need to keep the same numbers.

On the other hand he is wanting a personal mobile (for the 1st time ever) for evenings and weekends only, you would not believe the people who think it's OK to call him at 22:00 or later even on a Sunday to ask him to hang a door 20 miles away! The idea is if he has a personal moby he will only give it friends etc and turn off his works one when on hol/after a certain time of night/on the weekend etc

We've been looking, he isnt bothered about an all singing all dancing, but an mp3 player and camera would be good - also dialaphone etc have a free wii and wii fit for a 35 a month deal, which we would sell on for £250 to offset the rental cost

It would only be light usage on the personal one, prob less than 100 minutes and 50 txts a month

Any help gratefully recieved - we're going moby blind - I've never looked at PAYG before and the tarriffs are driving me mad!

Cavey

Replacing a phone doesn't lose your phone number. The phone number is attached to the SIM which is inside your mobile phone (looks like the chip on a credit card). As long as you keep this and meet the criteria of the phone company, the number wont expire.

Personally, I would go onto PAYG and then see how much it costs you over a month and whether you will use it. 100 mins and 50 texts is about £26 on O2 PAYG and £25 on T-Mobile, so a contract might be cheaper in the long run, but you need to properly figure out your usage (are the calls cross-network, to landlines, evenings/weekends or what?). You can also try this for free and walk away if you do not find it suits your needs (ie you're OH doesn't really need a personal mobile).

You might also want to see if the handset can be replaced by "work" as being tied into an 18 month contract in order to get the handset you want, only to find the contract is way more than you require, is a nightmare. You could also get one through PAYG. It wont be the latest all-singing model, but it should be reliable, possibly sturdier and cheaper to replace (and possibly useful as a hammer).

Having a handset already also allows you to go for a SIM-only contract. O2, Orange and T-Mobile's at the moment are quite well stacked - £15 for 200 minutes, 400 texts and free calls to O2 mobiles on [http://shop.o2.co.uk/tariffs/sim_only]O2[/url] or 350 minutes 650 texts on [url=http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/sim-card/pay-monthly/T-Mobile [/url]or 225 mins 100 SMS and unlimited landline calls on Orange - while Vodafone (250 minutes 100 SMS OR 150 mins 500 SMS for £15) is not quite as attractive .

Once you have a handset you want to use (either by work replacing it or by buying a new one on personal PAYG), you could look into a dual-SIM system. These are sleeves that take two SIM cards (so one from work, one from home) and then fit into your phone. You can then swap between them from a menu on the phones screen and if work is enabled home is not and vice-versa. Would mean you can't have both enabled at the same time, which I guess is a plus point in the evening and a minus during the day. It does, however, mean you don't have to carry around two mobile phones.

Anyway, that's a round-a-bout way of saying that there is a way to perfectly fit anyone's needs if they know what their needs are. I do not go in for free Wii's/etc.. (it's not my way of working), so I don't know them well enough to be able to recommend or comment on them, but looking at them in a way to offset the initial cost is interesting, but I would assume they have to be paid for somehow.