Mobile phones best deals in the UK

The best and cheapest deals for mobile telephones in Britain are to be found by buying directly online via the internet.
For example, this is what a major mobile phone retailer, says on its website:
"You may occasionally find the same phone for less money on our website than in our stores. This is because website orders generally cost us less money, which gives us greater flexibility in our pricing. (For example, on web orders we do not have to pay rental charges for a store)."
Here below are some of the best online stores.

E2save is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of mobile phones on-line, offering all of the latest handsets from the UK’s principal networks: T Mobile, Orange, BT Mobile, O2, Vodafone, and 3.

Pay monthly is a better option for most people: it gives you free inclusive calls every month, itemised bills, better handsets at lower prices.
E2save has several pay-monthly price plans all of which include 3 months free insurance and next day delivery within a 100% secure environment.
With its price match guarantee, it can offer the best deals as a promise, along with a great range of gifts and promotions tailored to its customers.
Its low price promise is: find a better deal and we'll match it.
It's an online store which receives very good reviews from customers, whose overall opinion is: "Good site, well executed and delivered order, very responsive, great value and hassle-free, good shopping experience."

Here's the link:
E2save

The Link is the UK's leading mobile communications retailer, selling mobile phones from all UK networks: BT Mobile, O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, Virgin Mobile.
has the biggest choice of the latest handsets on pre pay and contract, plus all the latest mobile services, accessories and homephones.
It has the lowest prices on several phones, among which Samsung A800 (Virgin).
Camera phones, colour mobiles, hands-free solutions and all the newest products and the latest technology can be found on its website, often at discounted prices and with special offers.
It offers free delivery on all orders.

Here's the link to its website:

The Carphone Warehouse is the largest independent retailer of mobile communications in Europe, and it's "By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen".
Its website sells everything to do with mobile communications:

• all types of mobile phones, including pay as you go and pay monthly
• PDAs, the latest handheld organisers and computers
• ring tones, unique tones for your mobile phones
• home phones: fixed line phones, fax machines and cordless telephones
• accessories or connectivity solutions for your mobile, landline phone or PDA.

Virgin Mobile is one of the fastest growing mobile phone networks in the UK.
Its offer is simple: 3p texting, free line rental and no contract.
With Virgin Mobile you get:

• 3p texting – to any other Virgin Mobile phone within the UK
• 1 simple tariff – standard calls cost just 15p per minute for the first 5 minutes of calls and 5p for each minute after that
• 0 strings – that means no line rental, and no fixed term contract.

Mobile Chooser offers a very vast choice and independent advice on mobile phones.
It says that it sells virtually every tariff and handset available in the UK, a wider range of mobile phones and tariffs than most online and high-street stores.
Mobile Chooser claims to guarantee to save customers money on both their mobile phone bill each month and on the purchase of a handset.
How? By giving customers a unique online 'Chooser' which independently finds the cheapest phone and tariff in the UK from all the over 100 available.

To visit it, here's the link:
Mobile Chooser

John Lewis has a good range of mobile phones, cordless phones and DECT digital phones.
Search under its Audio & TV Department online, and you'll find telephones of many types.
John Lewis has Pay As You Go and Prepay mobile phones by Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Sharp, Samsung, Philips.
Networks include Orange, Virgin, Vodafone, O2.
Digital cordless phones let you phone from any room in the house or garden without needing lots of phone sockets or handsets.
John Lewis has many cutting-edge cordless telephones, with all sorts of features and capabilities: hands-free speakerphone, multi-language menu display, caller number display, vibration alert, headset socket, LCD, pre-dialling facility, editing, conference and internal calls facility, number memories, vast indoor and outdoor range, handset paging facility just in case you mislay it, and several other caller and dialling facilities.
Some units support up to eight handsets, allowing you to have a handset in every room in the house, while others have cordless telephone answering machines with digital quality to give you super-clear sound.
Brands include BT, BT Synergy, Panasonic, Dialatron, Philips.
John Lewis has a 28 days free returns service.

Here's the link:
John Lewis online

O2 Consumer Shop is a premier site offering excellent mobile internet phones, all with free text messaging and WAP.
O2 is one of the UK's main mobile networks and is, among other things, the sponsor of the England team winner of the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
It has very good offers for pay monthly phones and good offers for pay as you go. All its pay monthly tariffs include up to 500 free texts and WAP minutes.

O2 Consumer Shop gets very high ratings from customers. Not surprisingly, if you consider that it has among the best deals and tariffs around.
Choosing an online tariff gives you online services: 24/7 e-care, online itemised billing, online help and order tracking.
O2 is a good choice when it comes to a new tariff for most people, especially if they are young and would like to take advantage of free text messaging and free WAP calls.

This is the link to its website:
O2 Consumer Shop

Argos, the high street company, is one of the most successful and trusted retailers in the UK today. Its range of 9000 top quality, branded products includes a vast selection of mobile phones, mobile phone handsets, digital cordless phones with answer machines, electronic organisers, telephones, answering machines, fax machines.
Philips, Sony, Motorola, Nokia mobile phones, also with WAP, are available. The site has a product and price comparison facility, for easier assessment.
There are often special offers, and everything's now at even better value than before, with 1200 prices down on their previous catalogue.
There are often special offers, and there's free delivery for orders of £150 or more.
It's a totally secure site for online shopping.
Argos

Currys sells online pay-as-you-go mobile phones from Panasonic, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Sendo, Sagem and other manufacturers, with O2, Orange, Virgin, Vodafone, T-Mobile networks.
Currys checks its prices daily against other retailers, making sure it has consistently low prices.
The Currys site has a useful comparison capability to allow customers to compare similar products.
It's worth checking its Web Exclusives, prices only available buying from Currys website which are much lower than in Currys stores.

Here's the link:
Currys

Dixons is one of the UK's well known household names and the country’s leading electrical retailer. It has a huge product range of over 2000 products online, from binoculars to mp3 players, from global positioning systems to recordable DVD players, for all technology needs.
Its website communications department has mobile phones, mobile phone vouchers, mobile phones pay as you go, line advance mobile phones, plus accessories: cases, chargers, fascias, mobile hands free kits.
Plus analogue cordless telephones, answer machines, digital cordless telephones, fax machines, telephones, two-way radios, and telephone accessories.
Dixons online store lets you compare brands for prices, products characteristics and quality, and its buyers guide give you impartial advice.
Dixons website has Web Exclusives, giving the best prices only to people who buy online.
Dixons website receives very good reviews from customers, for example these: "Price was online exclusive and £100 cheaper than in my local Dixons store and similar to the best price available here."
"I had been looking around for a while and in the Dixons shops the same item was on sale for £179.99 down from £199.99 so I could not believe that they were selling it so cheap online. I even phoned my nearest store if it was only online or was it on offer there too to be told no not that cheap."

Here's the link:
Dixons - Mobile phones & telephones

UK MOBILE PHONES PRICE COMPARISON SITES & SHOPPING ENGINES

DealTime is the UK part of the fourth largest online shopping network in the world.
It says: “We take the time and hassle out of searching the web for the best prices, bringing hundreds of competitive merchants together in one easy to use site. DealTime users can find everything from computer consumables to flowers or DVD players in one place. Our users can get detailed information on products, read other users reviews of products and stores, compare models, and of course – compare prices and purchase on line.”
It can help you choose the best mobile phone for you.
Here's the link:

Kelkoo is a shopping search engine to compare prices from hundreds of shopping sites to find the best prices when shopping online.
Kelkoo helps you to compare prices for different types of products and services, including mobile phones, telephones, fax machines, pre-pay phones, cordless telephones, palmtops, PDAs and accessories, from many manufacturers, among which Nokia, Palm, Psion, Handspring and various others.
Here's the link:

Kelkoo

UK BEST VALUE CORDLESS PHONES AND PHONE ACCESSORIES ONLINE RETAILERS

Tesco is not only the well-known grocery retailer, but also a big online department store.
Its Tesco Electrical Warehouse offers great value on many kinds of products, including cordless phones and phone accessories from major brands.
Tesco Electrical Warehouse online offers safe and secure shopping, free delivery on all products, Clubcard points on all purchases, an emergency delivery service on selected lines, and good value repair protection plans.

To visit Tesco Electricals Store online click here:
Tesco Electrical Warehouse online

O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone, 3, Orange and Virgin are networks. Each network is basically a collection of radio towers all over the country, linked together, transmitting people's conversations and all the other information mobile phones are used for. This includes WAP (the mobile internet, see below) and SMS (short message service, for sending text messages between phones).

Networks do not in general supply your phone or bill you. Your handset is sold to you by the retailer (such as the Carphone Warehouse and other online shops outlined above), who also arranges connection to the network and a billing account using a service provider.
One important thing to note about handsets is their actual cost, rather than the price you pay at purchase. To encourage new subscribers, the networks subsidise the cost of new handsets, provided they are being purchased with a new network connection. If you wish to buy a handset without a network connection, then you will need to pay the full price, which may be considerably higher. Because of this you should consider taking out some form of insurance policy on your new phone.
This also explains why the same phone may have a different price on different networks, because the subsidy may be different.

Pay Monthly or Pay As You Go?
There are two different ways to pay for your mobile phones call and service charges. You can choose to be billed monthly for your calls and services. This involves committing to a contract, usually with a minimum contract period of 12 months. You may not sign an actual piece of paper (particularly if you buy online), but these contracts are still legally binding. If you buy this sort of Pay Monthly phone, the network will subsidise it quite heavily, to the extent that some phones can be offered free of charge with these plans.

A recent development is the ability to Pay As You Go. You buy credit for the phone, often directly from the network using a credit/debit card. You can also purchase credit in the form of vouchers, which give you a special code to enter into the phone, which then registers the credit. The network subsidy on this type of phone is considerably less then pay monthly, so purchase prices are often many times higher than for pay monthly phones.

If you have purchased a Pay Monthly phone, your mobile phone bill will be sent to you by a service provider. This is a company that acts between you and the network to ensure you have access to the network and to bill you for the calls that you make and services that you use. Some networks own some or even all of their service providers.

If you have purchased a Pay As You Go phone you will not be sent a bill. Instead, you purchase credit for your phone, and this credit then runs down as you make calls, or use network services.
The bill that your service provider sends you, or the rate at which your calling credit reduces, will be calculated using the tariff that you have chosen.

When you buy a mobile phone, you choose a tariff. All the networks offer a choice of tariffs for Pay Monthly phones, and many offer a choice for their Pay As You Go phones too.
The tariff consists of a list of charges (if any) for calls that you make. These charges vary depending on where and when you make the call, the telephone number that you are calling and for services that you use, such as line provision or voicemail (a mobile phones answering service).

Mobile phone call charges are now lower than ever, and the following tips will help to keep your charges down.

• There are thousands of mobile phone tariffs on offer in the UK, so make sure that your tariff matches your lifestyle. If you're making the majority of your calls during the day, then choose a tariff that offers low daytime charges. Alternatively, if you use your mobile phone more as a social tool in the evening, then your tariff should offer low evening calls. If your lifestyle suddenly changes, don't forget to change your tariff accordingly.
• Choose the same network as your friends and family: BT Cellnet, Vodafone, Orange and One2One all charge less for calls made to the same network.
• Pay as You Go packages work on call vouchers that you buy up front so you'll never get a bill, but they can sometimes be more expensive than Pay Monthly packages. Alternatively, some packages will offer a direct debit system with a monthly charge limit.
• Get your bills itemised so that you can monitor your calls.

WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, enables users to access mobile Internet content and services from a WAP mobile phone, as well as personal organisers and pagers.
WAP has developed at a great pace over the past year, and the number of WAP portals and WAP sites is growing at an ever increasing rate. This is great news for WAP phone owners, as they now have much more choice and a higher quality of service than ever before; developers become better at designing content specifically with the mobile phone user in mind. More and more services will be coming on line in the very near future.
The cost of a WAP phone starts from just £ 50, which is much cheaper than a PC, and with WAP phones you can make and receive phone calls and send and receive emails, as well as access the Internet.
A good portal is now definitely the best starting point, that will offer you news, shopping, entertainment, travel, directories, sport and finance as well as email and organisational facilities such as a diary. Your portal can be customised, so it shows you the information that matters to you.
To access the mobile internet you need a WAP phone, a connection to a UK digital network, a WAP service provider, and a data-enabled SIM card.
It won’t be too long before WAP becomes a standard handset feature.
One thing is sure: access to information in the future will be predominantly from small, mobile, handheld devices rather than from devices that are tied to one location, like TVs and PCs.

PDA, or Personal Digital Assistant, is a small device which allows you to store names, addresses and appointments at the touch of a button.
PDAs are in fact the latest handheld organisers and computers. PDAs can also be used to read emails and access the internet (with a compatible phone).

SIM card, or Subscriber Identity Module, is a small, unique chip inserted in the mobile phone, that connects you to a network and stores your input information so, if you change phones, you can keep all your personal information.

Some Nokia phones can download and store personalised ringing tones.
Once you have purchased your ringtone, it will be sent to your phone using Smart Messaging, a method of sending programming information to your phone over the network.

Roaming allows you to use your mobile phone when abroad: most networks have this facility. The number of countries where you can use your mobile depends on which network you are connected to. If your phone will not work abroad it is possible to hire mobile phones from several UK retailers. Making and receiving international calls is expensive, so you should watch all calls carefully.

When you roam, certain facilities, like voicemail, data/fax transfer and short messaging, can be affected, again depending on the network.
Each country will charge for calls in different increments, e.g. in the UK you will be charged per second, whereas in Australia you will be charged in 30-second units. It can also take several weeks for the roamed calls to register back to your network provider, so charges may not appear on your next bill.
When receiving an incoming call while roaming, you will be charged for the international leg of the call (from UK to whichever country you are in). The calling party will then pay for the national leg of the call (as if you were in your home country). This is because the calling party cannot be expected to know that you are travelling abroad and hence cannot be charged for an international call they are unaware they are making.