your guide to the pefect mobile (Buyers Guide: Mobile Phones)

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Product:	Buyers Guide: Mobile Phones
Date:	11/11/01 (17 review reads)
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The mobile phone market is now huge and for anyone who doesn't have a mobile yet, the choice can seem overwhelming. I started off with prepay phones and then moved onto contract phones, my current phone is a Nokia 8210.

The choice of phones is limited by the package you want to buy, if you go for prepay the choice is a lot more limited and the phones tends to be more basic. The range of contract phones is much larger and the phones are usually more advanced. The most important features are probably the operating system of the phone, the size and weight and the battery life. The first feature that most people look at is size and weight of the phone, as you can simply pick up the models in a shop and have a look at them. Most mobiles these days are reasonably small (unlike previous phones like the Philips Diga) and are comfortable to use in the hand. Most manufacturers offer exceptionally light phones, Nokia have the 8210 and 8850, Ericsson the T28 and Motorola the V50. The Nokias and the Motorola are expensive and only available on contract. You also have to make do with poorer battery life and in the case of the Motorola, a small screen. The T28 is available on Cellnet Prepay for £150, which is the most expensive out of the whole range. Although small phones are cool, a more normal sized one can be a lot cheaper. Most phones offer fairly decent battery life these days, but if you're using the phone a lot, a Lithium Ion battery is best, they are lighter than Nickel Metal Hydride, plus they last longer. You can also charge them up whenever you want, which you can't with Nickel metal Hydride as they suffer from memory effect, which means the battery performance will degrade if you don't let the battery go empty before charging it.
The operating system is very important in a phone, currently Nokia offers the best. Nokia phones have large screens with very simple interfaces, the 5110/3210/3310 all use a 'navi' key. This one button c
hanges depending on what screen you are in and makes the phone very easy to use. Most other manufacturer's phones are reasonably easy to use, but if you're buying a mobile for the first time, Nokia's system is really unbeatable.

Voice dialling is becoming more and more available on phones, although I am not bothered about it. Dialling by speaking a name into the phone is a good idea but most of the phones do it so slowly it's quicker just to hit the speedial key. If the phone you want comes with it, fine, however, I wouldn't make any special effort to have it on a phone.

WAP is becoming available on a lot of phones now, but the question is, is it any good? Personally I think WAP is not a bad thing but I wouldn't buy a phone specially for it, it's a handy feature to have if the phone comes with it.

If you are buying a contract phone there more features to consider. One of the main ones is, do you intend to use you phone to connect to the internet with a PDA or laptop? If so buying a phone with a built in modem is a good idea, some examples of this are the Nokia 7110 and the Samsung A100. Many phones are data & fax compatible which means if you want to access the through your phone you have to buy a GSM modem, which is around £100. If you're never going to use the phone with a PDA or laptop then it doesn't matter but if you ever intend to it could be worth the money. For example, the Ericsson T28 is free on most contracts and has no modem, but it does have data&fax compatibility. The more expensive Nokia 8210 does have a builtin modem and costs around £50 to £80 on contract. However, if you ever decide to use the T28 with a laptop or PDA you need to pay £100 for the D128 modem, which makes it more expensive than the 8210, even though the 8210 is a better phone.

Recommendations then?
On prepay first;
Nokia 5110: An older phone now, but can be picked up for around £40 and it is still a
very good phone. It offers EFR, which makes calls clearer and the famous X-press on covers. Battery life is decent and the phone is reasonably although quite heavy at 171grams. There are very few of these around now, but still worth purchasing.

Nokia 3210 The replacement for the 5110 and a very good one at that. The 3210 is smaller and lighter, as well as having an internal aerial. It also features predictive text input which makes writing text messages a breeze. The 3210 also features front and back changeable covers which are great for when you get bored of the current colour. Like the 5110 there are three games including the classic snake. Battery life is not bad although it does take a while to charge the phone. Prices are around £70.

Siemens C35: Smaller and lighter than the 3210 as well as having WAP capabilites, although slightly more expensive than the 3210. Still quite new but it's finding many fans due to its small size. The C35 also features the predictive text input and several game. The only downside is a relatively small screen.

Contract phones:

Nokia 7110: Yes, another Nokia but they really are good phones. The 7110 does everything and features a cool active slide and a huge screen. Battery life is excellent but the main downside to the phone is its size.

Nokia 6210: A smaller, lighter version of the 7110, although slightly more expensive. it boasts most of the features of the 7110, with High speed data on Orange (Not available on Everday50) and voice dialling. No spring loaded slide or navi-roller this time though. Prices are more reasonable now, although it is still quite a bit more expensive than the 7110.

Nokia 8210: This phone has come down in price quite a lot recently on Cellnet and Vodafone and is a very accomplished phone. Featuring just about everything you could want, including an infrared modem and voice dialling. With having a smaller battery than other phones, battery life
does unfortunately suffer, but the battery is lithium Ion, which means you can charge it whenever you want.

As you can tell I am very biased towards Nokia, but their mobile phones are excellent, no-one can argue with the amount that have been sold. In the end it's best to buy a phone you are happy with. There is no point buying a phone like the Nokia 7110 if you never intend to use the WAP facilities or the built in modem. Although the Motorola V50 has poor battery life, a poor operating system and a small screen, people will like it just because it's so small.

(Update)
I have bought my past few phones from Carphonewarehouse, online dealers may be cheaper but I prefer to have a shop I can walk into if there are any problems. Some of the Assistants may not know a lot about mobile phones but they usually try and sort you out. Certainly this is my experience in the Edinburgh area. They have a very good price-matching policy which does include internet offers although I have heard of some shops refusing to do this. I also like their ultimate price promise, if your phone goes down in price within three months of buying it they send you a credit note. Not quite as good as money but better than nothing. I don't like the Link very much, I originally went to buy my phone from them and found them to be very unhelpful and then giving me the wrong information about what I needed to start a contract. I have also found the BT shops to be equally unhelpful, no-one seemed to be able to help me, nor could they be bothered to find anyone that could. As for online shops, I have used mobileshop.com and found them to be very good. Their delivery was very fast and when there were problems with the phone I sent it back and they even refunded the delivery. Their prices are also very good. I have ordered from studentmobiles.com, who are tied in with Carphonewarehouse but found them to be totally useless. I was intending to buy a Nokia 7110 from Carphonew
arehouse but was offered a 7110 for free (it was £50 in the shops) at a student fair. I was told that I could return it to a Carphonewarehouse if I didn't like it and they could there were any problems. Sounded good to me. However, no phone ever came and despite many phonecalls, successive orders were just as bad. They may be better now but I certainly won't order from them again.

Onto the networks then..
Choosing a network is a little more difficult than choosing a phone, there is no 'best' network to go for. Currently, there are four main networks; BTCellnet, Vodafone, Orange and One2one. To complicate matters a bit more there are also now several 'virtual' networks, these are companies that use existing networks. Currently using the One2one network are Virgin, Fresh and Telecom Plus, and using the Cellnet network is Genie.
The first consideration when choosing a network is coverage, the best way to find out is to ask friends or fanily who already have a phone to see how they get on, I tend to find coverage maps unreliable. Currently Vodafone and Orange probably offer the best coverage, although all the networks have regions where they don't work so well. Obviously, above all else you want a mobile phone you can rely on, and that you don't have to go outside everytime to make a call. The second consideration to make is who are you going to be calling? Calling people on different networks tends to be very expensive, so it's best to choose the network that most of the people you know are on.

Next, what tariff do you want? There are lots of tariffs available, so it takes a bit of looking around to find one that suits you the most. The first choice is prepay or contract. Prepay phones are more expensive to start with, especially now that the prices have been put up. However, after the price of the handset, you simply pay for calls and text messages. The choice of phones is more limited and the phones av
ailable are more basic. These days however, most of the phones available are pretty good and have plenty features. I stil remember the day when I paid £70 for a Philips Diga... The Cellnet prepay scheme is fairly unremarkable, the call charges are resonable, going down to 2p at the weekend. Vodafone offer two prepay tariffs; allcalls and smartstep. The allcalls tariff is similar to Cellnet, although the call charges are slightly higher. One the smartstep tariff you pay 25p minutes for the first three minutes of each day and 5p per minutes after that, whatever time of day it is. Orange have a fairly standard charging scheme, although you can choose an okk peak time slot during peak hours, lower your call charges by crediting a £50 voucher and get 5 free texts a day by paying £15 for the Outhere pack. The main tariff on One2one is similar to the Smartstep tariff, you pay 30p a minute for the first two minutes and then 5p a minute for the rest of the day. I think they still offer their older tariff where you pay a daily charge but I don't know much about them. Virgin aren't strictly a prepay service, they offer contract services such as fax/data. However, they can still be used as a prepay sevice, their calls are similar to one2one, 15p a minute for the first five miuntes and then 5p per minutes afterwards. Both Virgin and One2one offer free Voicemail retrieval. Genie have the most innovative tariff, completely free text messages, provided you make at least £10 worth of calls each month.

Contract phones are much cheaper initially, generally a phone that would cost around £100 on prepay will be free on contract , with free acessories as well. Line rental starts at around £13 a month, usually including a certain amount of calltime each month. Bearing in mind the higher initial cost of handsets on prepay, a contract may work out cheaper, depending on how many calls you are going to make. Once signing up to a contract it is usually relatively tricky to le
ave it within 12 months, plus it more difficult to keep trakc of costs, the only way to do it is via a monthly bill. There are many tariffs available on contract, too many for me to even begin describing.

As for the actual networks themselves, personally I am on Vodafone, I live in Edniburgh and Inverness and find the coverage to be excellent, plus their network capacity seems to be very good, I very rarely get network busy messages. I am on the Leisure 500 tariff, which doesn't offer as much calltime as the other netowrks but the 10p per minute peak to other Vodafone mobiles is very handy. I used to be with Cellnet, but left them because the network coverage had degraded significantly from when I signed up, plus I frequently found it hard to make a call because the network was too busy, plus I dropped a lot of calls, again because the network was too busy. Cellnet do a lot off good offers, currently you can get double inclusive calltime, plus half price text messages which are very tempting, but the network cannot seem to cope with the amount of people that are drawn in by these offers. Personally, I am steering clear of Cellnet for the moment. Orange offer very good coverage and have a huge range of tariffs, they can also match most of the tariffs offered by other networks. This is very good if you want a different tariff, but the coverage for that particular network is not good. At the moment Orange are the only network offering HSCSD, which allows you to connect to up to speeds of 28.8K with a compatible phone. Also 0800 calls are free, including data calls. Another useful feature is the free 'Orange care' insurance which comes with Talk 60 and above. However, the range of phones available on Orange are much more limited than the other networks, plus they all have an Orange badge on them and they are locked to Orange (this means that only Orange SIMS can be used with them). One2one are the smallest network and have the poorest network cover
age, plus they also lock their phones to One2one. Some of the tariffs are good, particularly the newly launched precept Max tariff which gives you completely free calls to landlines or other One2one mobiles for £75 a month.

yht prices are probably out of date so use them as a rough guide

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