Not just have 3 matched T-Mobile’s Flext tariffs, but they’ve done some other interesting things. Take the N95, for example – even if you select the cheapest (£15 per month) tariff, the N95 remains free! One small point, you can only get the N95 with 120 video calling minutes, which costs £12 per month, so in essence there is an element of a payment for having a top spec phone. Even adding X-Series Silver to this results in a combined monthly cost of £32 per month, no one-off cost for the N95, and you are getting 300 minutes or texts, 120 video calling minutes, and 1Gb of data, plus a load of Skype minutes, MSN messages (both on top of the 1Gb of data). The only missing information on the 3 website is either those 120 video minutes are cross network… They are 3 to 3 only (as clearly stated in the full 3 price guide, which is another good point about 3 – try finding a full price guide for every dialling code on the other UK mobile providers’ websites…)

Compare that to T-Mobile’s cheapest tariff: On the cheapest Web’n'Walk (which doesn’t allow instant messaging), the monthly cost is £22.50, but the phone costs £220. Over the 18 months of the contract that’s £625 compared to £576 on 3.

Leave the contract running for 2 years though, and T-Mobile is £760 compared to £768, so there’s some logic in changing plan / tariff / company before 2 years is up to keep ahead financially (plus, you’ll be fed up with the limited battery life of the N95 well before then). Of course, if you want IMs, then you need to pay a higher monthly charge to T-Mobile (although it does raise the monthly data limit too), which changes the figures.

Two final points – that £22.50 from T-Mobile gets you 170 minutes or 340 texts, so if you use the phone more than you text, 3 are giving you nearly twice the number of minutes, a better data plan, and no upfront cost. Secondly, 3 will also throw in an additional 300 3 to 3 minutes per month (my partner isn’t on 3, so this is less useful to me, hence I’ve not majored on it, but it could easily swing it for others).

Coo.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.