On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

In this I am going to tell you how for £675 minimum over 18 months you can get a brand new contract with Virgin Mobile with more minutes and texts than O2’s basic iPhone tariff, a Sony Ericsson K800i with a Free iPod Nano 4GB (3rd generation, so it’s the newest one) and an Asus Eee PC laptop.

This compares to the £899 minimum cost of ownership over 18 months for just an iPhone. Read on and find out how.

(Virgin Mobile are not affiliated with me, I’m just a very happy customer who got a crackin deal.)

Introduction

I’ve never been a great ‘purveyor’ of ‘mobile phones but I have had sufficient models throughout the years now, Motorolas, Sagems, Nokias, Trium, Sony Ericssons, NECs. Bloody hell, what a mobile footprint alone I have and I’m not the type to upgrade ‘Jus’ like that.’

Two of them had been lost (the last phone I ‘mislaid’ was in 2002 in the car park at work where I put my silver Sagem phone on the ground it was a nice one, blue backlight–but not enough room to squeeze into the door with all my clobber so I put my papers and phone down; jumped in, drove out a bit; picked up the papers and forgot the silver phone on the grey gravel… Umph!) and the others have been passed on; sold etc. My favourite phones have been:

• Nokia 3210. Yass, the 3310 was better but this was the daddy. And in 1999 you were the don if you owned this phone. I didn’t because I’m a sad loser. (It’s good when you can poke fun at yourself I find!) But I did eventually get one and it was great. Snake, Predictive Text, Customisable Fascias and Customisable Ringtones. Oh yes.
• Nokia 7210. This came somewhat later; owned this between 2003 and 2004. Great phone with a whacky keypad and overall blue design but it was the first usable colour phone I owned. Very reliable and easy to use; travelled far and wide around the world with it too. Solid and sorely missed.
• Sony Ericsson w810i. It’s not got the best camera, it’s not even got the best music player and the video capture is shoddy at best. However it’s just got that something, it’s easy to use, it’s no fuss, it’s durable and a great little phone with a half decent camera when you’re outside and understand the concept of exposure and white balance etc. See my flickr pages for photos taken with it; some are good–others are typical night out grain-fests)

Now I have another to add to this list. It’s just awesome. It’s my best phone ever. And everyone knows it, is talking about it. It’s…

Not an iPhone

Haha. Gotcha. Actually no one is talking about it, but a few know of it. I used an iPhone in September (Aren’t I the industry insider…Hmm!) and I just thought, hmm OK. And that was it, I didn’t even particularly like it a great deal. It felt like a lot of hot air was in my hands and I didn’t think, “This is a revolutionary device.” I just didn’t think much of it at all really. Sure the iPod feature on it was nice enough; but it seemed a little ‘effort-some’ to just launch the iPod facility and the touch interface varied between cool, awkward and sometimes unusable. For one I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy using a touch keyboard, I like real 1980s-esque keys. Buttons. Mechanic frivolity all the way please.

Safari was Safari. With it’s sometimes odd WebKit/KHTML backend which tends to render things differently from Firefox and Opera; and I couldn’t really get WordPress to work either. Safari on the Mac is a fine nippy browser (and my personal choice when I owned a Mac as Firefox felt like a dog on my Macs, 1.5GHz G4s basically) and not that bad but it does some quirky things. As a web developer I know it adheres to Acid 2; but I’m not utterly convinced by some of its HTML rendering as being ‘right’ and I usually benchmark with Firefox and Opera (and on occassion IE7.) Certainly I have been ‘amused’ to find what Safari does with my pages, particularly forms… However to get back on track; it looked pretty, it looked neat. That said I still think Mobile stylesheets are the way forward a la Opera Mini.

In the end I just got frustrated with the way the web browser worked. The Google Maps applet was interesting but you can do such a lot on the standard Google Maps website anyway; and even more so when you consider devices like the Nokia N95 have a built in GPS! The iPhone suddenly seems like an expensive device for not a lot when you consider the ‘kitchen sink phone’ that the N95 is. You can get the latter on a cheap monthly rate for about £100 for the phone (or indeed free!) The N95 is in a nutshell the better phone of the two. Easily.

Do I have an iPhone Vendetta?

Don’t be absurd. I’m not saying everyone thinks and will find the iPhone sucks; I personally don’t think much of it. And I certainly wouldn’t pay £270 for the privilege plus an expensive unspectacular contract for 18 months. 200 included texts? Ahh yass. (Can’t you imagine Neal Cassady just saying “Yass Yass Yass!” a la Kerouac’s descriptions, Hmmm yass.. )

Looking on O2’s website (the official iPhone carrier until you’ve unlocked it; and why in the hell is Apple getting away with what Microsoft would be slapped about stupidly if they did the same with their ‘lock in’ policies. Shame on you Apple. Where’s your moral highground!)

Anyway the cheapest iPhone over 18 months will assuming you never call a number outside the ‘any network and time’ remit, never send over 200 messages a month–will cost you:

£269.00 iPhone Touch one off price. (Hang on, $399 = ~£200… Ahhh the £70 is the UK shafting levy…)
£35.00 x 18 months (minimum term) for 200 minutes and 200 messages. (Which is shit you’ll agree.)

Total minimum cost of ownership over 18 months: £899

That’s a lot money.

And you, Vicky?

So what do I pay? Well have eventually upgraded myself as a very good offer came along with my current network, Virgin Mobile which uses the T-Mobile network. I’ll tell you more about what I got in a minute.

300 minutes + 300 texts, 18 month contract and unused minutes/texts roll over to the next month and free Voicemail calls. £25 a month.

It’s the same tariff I was on the past year and a bit; but back then 12 month was still pretty pervasive for a mobile contract; but I very rarely went over the allocation as I have no friends and no social life. (That is also a sarcastic joke, no really it is! ) So £25 a month is what I paid. So over the next 18 months my mobile bill will come to:

£0.00 Sony Ericsson K800i
£25.00 x 18 months (300/300)

Total cost of ownership: £300.00

Not bad huh? But there are better deals, and yes the phone is ‘old’ now (read: it’s over 12 months old, what an antique eh… But more on that in a bit) except there was one other thing that swayed me. Right now, any contract (renewed or new customer) is eligible for a free gift.

Now it’s not a plastic kazoo or a bag of dried apricots (mmmm) but a bloody good choice of:

• Playstation Portable Slim (Or whatever they’re called)
• iPod Nano 4GB
• £100 credit on your contract

I’m going for the the iPod hoping that Apple’s recent ‘lock in’ to iTunes is easily circumvented, yes get that–Apple introduced features to force you into using iTunes to manage your iPod, yes YOUR iPod. The one you paid for and now belongs to you, not Apple. Thankfully this has already been ‘broken’ so I can use Rhythmbox to manage it. But that’s £99 of product there. And that goes to show I’m not anti-Apple, just anti bad business practices.

So in actual fact I have got one sweet phone with a decent screen resolution of 320×240, a fantastic 3.2MP camera (which is one of the best on a phone with anti shake, Xenon flash and other very cool features for what is a phone) and a decent 4GB music player. So actually, I’ve got all this for £200.

And the K800i is 3G; not 2.5G. so I could do video calls (very unlikely, but very cool to see after seeing ‘Video Phones’ in 1994 or so at BT’s Goonhilly site; and those were black and white STN displays…Amazing!) and so forth, but it also has a RDS enabled Radio, Java support (Opera Mini 4) and so forth.

Basically, I think the K800i and its true successor the K850i shafts the iPhone where it hurts.

No it’s not Apple, and no it’s not got a music player like an iPod; but it’s good and considering Virgin Mobile are throwing in an iPod anyway–what are you going to loose?

The Decent Tariff

Basically for a decent minutes package you have to spend £45 a month which beats what I get with Virgin. But none the less you would then have a minimum cost of ownership of £1079! That’s for a phone. To borrow BMW’s advert, it’s just a phone, only a phone, a phone!

Pray silence please for a bit of common bloody sense

Ok if you’ve not been hoisted in yet, but you’re thinking of an iPhone still because you get a ‘proper’ internet device (the K800i ‘does’ RSS feeds too.) consider this. What if you got the new Asus EEE laptop?

With that you get a proper mobile device no bigger than most hardback books, wireless and an 800×480 display. You get a real web browser and a real computer. Firefox, Open Office, iPod support, Flash video, Java… It’s a small laptop basically and you can run Windows on it if you want but the supplied Linux (Xandros IIRC) desktop is very good. That’s £225. It comes with Wireless 802.11b/g. You can connect your K800i for example to it and sync up your photos and music easily.So I reckon my advice to you if you don’t mind a couple of devices with one thrown in for free; my utter bargain for you lot is:

FREE Sony Ericsson K800i from Virgin Mobile
£25.00 a month 300 Minutes + 300 Text call page
FREE iPod Nano 4GB (third generation)
£225 Asus Eee PC

Total cost over 18 months (Min): £675

I think that’s a no brainer over the almost minimum £900 you’ll pay for the iPhone. Plus you’ve got a real computer there that can be dropped into your satchel or bag and voila.