Recently, 3UK have used innovative pricing to make their phones and tariffs appealing; instead of charging upfront for the phone, they have offered the phone for free, but increased the monthly price plan as required, so a phone that costs £20 per month for Mix & Match 300 was made up of £15 per month for the tariff and £5 per month for the phone (resulting in a charge of £90 over the 18 months).  Of course, one downside of this was that if you didn’t change phones at 18 months, then 3UK would continue to get an additional charge per month…

Well, according to Gerry at nokiAAddict, it looks like 3UK may be returning to a more traditional model for the Nokia N97, partly, we suspect, to appear competitive with the other networks.

You see, on their old scheme, they would probably charge something like £35 per month for the phone on Mix & Match 300, which gives 300 cross network minutes; but with Vodafone offering 900-odd cross network minutes for only a few pounds per month more, it doesn’t look good value.

As such, 3UK will be charging a one-off payment for the phone (like, to be fair, Vodafone do on the tariff mentioned above).  So, it looks like the Nokia N97 will cost £100 on a £35 per month 18 month contract, and as much as £200 on a £15 per month 18 month contract.  Of course, you can get the phone for free from Vodafone, but then you’ll be committed to even more (£40 per month) or a 24 month contract.

3UK haven’t officially released the full range of prices yet, but we will let you know when they do, and once the other networks all confirm their pricing, we’ll compare them all to see which ones actually offer good value…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 3:32 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.