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Jason (15/04/2008)
£15 a month? I haven't spent that in the last *12* months!
Maybe not, but "jody!" claims to spend a tenner a month - that's a max of £60 a year less - and if their deal includes a "free phone", if the phone's any good it has to be worth substantially more than £60.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian cultural anthropologist once wrote that "Ideology has no history". To understand what he said, you have to understand that to an anthropologist, "ideology" doesn't mean what it means when used in casual conversation: instead it means "the totality of your cultural beliefs" (stuff you don't even think about, like "it's not done to walk around with your flies unzipped".) There's an inherent, unquestioned, assumption that "I'm perfectly normal because everyone else is pretty much like me, believes pretty much the things I believe, and they always have done, and always will do". It extends into the world of IT, as it does to every other field. I used to be a PAYG user, on Orange: they had a deal that if you topped up by £50, you got half price calls - £50 paid got you £100 worth of "enduring" airtime. That £50 lasted me over a year! Then I spotted the SIM-only deals that Scancom were offering (does anyone remember the days when Scan used to advertise in MM?! Scancom's their phones offshoot) They offered me not one but TWO O2 SIMs for £2 a month each. From memory they gave 100 minutes and 100 texts each. I had one, my son had the other. I've not seen a Scancom deal recently - but then, I don't visit their website as often as I used to. But they often used to have amazing SIM only deals - particularly for "off peak" tariffs; my assumption was that they'd take the SIM out of the box with the phone, and replace it with a PAYG SIM... then split the subsidy from the carrier between the phone and the SIM, which they sold separately.
Expenditure patterns are ideally motivated by "rational consumption" - being well informed about what gets you the best deal. And what offers the best deal continually changes. I bought my first mobile brand new (a Motorola t2288e) for £15 including a fiver's worth of airtime, because it was cheaper to use than a phone boxes, and my commuting route homewards depended on catching a connecting train: I needed to be able to tell my wife when I'd be back. The low price reflected a pint weeks before the end of a price war between carriers, who'd up to that point been heavily subsidizing PAYG handsets: a T2288e was worth a lot more that the effective tenner I'd paid. I picked Orange, because their topups "endured" - didn't have to be used up within a set time. Scancom's absurd pay-monthly deal made even more sense - After the "£50" special deal from Orange ended, I topped up by more than £2 a month. Curiously, I bought a brand new Orange PAYG mobile for my mother (who lives off shore in the IoM) last month; she only uses it when she comes to visit the mainland. It was a Motorola, and it cost £15, with a fiver's worth of airtime included. Ten years pass, and things have changed back to a point where they're exactly where they were before.
If Jason's a truly rational consumer, then he should put his RAZR on Ebay, and replace it with a "Motofone F3". The balance of what he'd get for the RAZR minus what he'd have to pay for the F3 would cover top-ups for several years.
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Pentium
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BigRon (15/04/2008)
Expenditure patterns are ideally motivated by "rational consumption" - being well informed about what gets you the best deal.
I don't think that anyone here is arguing with that, but it doesn't alter the fact that many of us use a mobile phone as an emergency means of communication and for little else.
If a company wants to actually give me a new phone (as opposed to lying about it being free) and then charge me less than £40 per year for the cost of the calls I make and charge me for nothing else, then I'll consider it.
Any other course of action could be considered as me allowing them to rip me off or them deliberately ripping me off, depending upon the viewpoint taken. 
Cheers, Slipstreem. 
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Octo-core Atom @ 233GHz (ES)
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| I don't know about the philosophy behind it but I simply bought the cheapest genuine flip phone they had on the shelves at Tesco. That was the amount of thought that went into it -- and it cost me £39 with £10 talk time thrown in. How does this relate to coverage of smartphones in MM? 
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186
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Apologies for the purple prose.... my thoughts got interrupted when the phone rang! My (mostly overlooked when I got back to writing) point was that rational consumption is largely a myth (although it remains a mainstay of right-wing political thought, particularly in the USA. I also contribute - indeed own - a forum dedicated to the discussion of political and economic matters!) We tend to make "informed decisions" about a very small number of things... and we tend "not to keep up with the literature". We, as a group, know that "good advice" as regards I.T. matters has a shorter shelf life than wet fish. 18 months back, the "good advice" was bases your system around an AMD processor... these days the world has changed, and Intel are back in the driving seat.
Same "things change" deal with mobile contracts. I note with disappointment that Scancom are no longer doing their "Trotters' Independent Trading" act with SIMs and phones. That's kind of sad, because some of the "pay monthly" deals they offered beat most of the deals you guys are getting on PAYG (with the possible exception of Jason, who seems to hardly make calls at all). They've also closed down their "Gone in 24" clearance line department - and that used to be kind of fun.
Back when I worked for Orange (and owned that sad T3388e) smartphones barely existed - there were the 9- series Nokias (which looked like spectacle cases - they featured in a James Bond movie) - but the technology simply wasn't there yet: if you needed to, you used a PDA (like an iPaq) and connected it through bluetooth or Infra red (a lot less reliable) to your mobile phone - bandwidth was little better than pathetic until GPRS came along. Sendo/HTC/Microsoft's "SPV" changed things as the first "two-and-a-halfth" generation device that allowed enough bandwidth to make internet access via your phone worth thinking about. My t3388 would do "WAP"... but that's not really "the internet" is it?
Back when I first started thinking about getting online, the web looked very little like it does now: it was academia, the military and the Butlins-camp-in-the-desert that were Compuserve or AOL. Why would anyone have wanted to get online? It was a desert: there was almost zero content. Not even "porn and piracy" (although those mainstays could be found on hundreds of BBS sites) Things change. I've been wracking my brain to try and remember the name of the ISP I signed up with and who beat Freeserve (by a couple of weeks) to become the first UK provider of a "free" dialup service.
I like smartphones perhaps because they remind me of my first brush with IBM's. Remember when programs usually fitted on a single floppy? And that floppy really "flopped" - but only stored 360k of data? I remember one of my then-infant son's favourite games, called "Cartooners", which allowed you to laboriously create animated cartoons - in glorious CGA colour. Programmers made their code jump through hoops because they HAD to: they couldn't simply say "Your hardware isn't good enough - go out and spend a few hundred quid on an upgrade!" They had to write code that worked with what was there. (Russian programmers used to have a similar reputation for writing "tight code", because their hardware was so often deficient.) Software that runs on a smartphone tends to be similar: code that's gone back to the days when the WHOLE program fits comfortably on a single floppy. Where that indefinable something that's "Gameplay" trumped graphics that it takes a cutting edge VGA card (costing more than my whole computer) to do justice to.
I didn't much like the MP3 player provided with my Nokia E61... so I downloaded a few FREE ones. I could have fitted ALL the ones I downloaded on a single 1.44meg floppy, with room to spare. The Symbian world seems to be much like that of Linux.
Maybe one thing that also makes a big difference is that I don't drive or own a car (although my wife does!) When, 35 years back, my driving instructor said "right, you're now ready to take the test", it dawned on me that I'd HATED every minute of every single lesson. Why would I want to take a test to allow me to do something that I absolutely hated? So I never did take the test. Which means that on the way to and from work ever since (apart from when I cycled!) there's a "free gap" in my day when I want to be entertained, interested... to be able to listen to music, watch a film... But I don't want to have to lug something around that's significantly bigger than a pack of playing cards.
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Octo-core Atom @ 233GHz (ES)
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Ah, well, I can see we're radically different. I still enjoy driving, even after all these years and with all the jams and frustrating impositions we now have forced on us. When I want time to think, to relax, a bit of personal space, I go for a spin round the local country roads, with the radio on or a favourite CD. Can't beat it! Maybe that ideology goes some way to explaining why I'm not sold on smartphones and you are...
Classic PCs
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Home Computers
Commodore VIC-20 · C64 original · C64 Terminator edition · C16 · Amiga 500 · Amiga 600 · Amiga 600 HD · Amiga 1200 Acorn Electron · A3010 (Archimedes) · A4000 (Archimedes) Others Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K · Dragon 32
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Pentium
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186
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LG Viewty ftw...
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186
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MMchief (17/04/2008)
LG Viewty ftw...
Given the cost of the KU990 on PAYG, I'd guess that you pay monthly! My son has one on "3".
Hutchison Whampoa (a Chinese company which I suspect that few of you have heard of!) started, then sold, "Orange"; then re-appeared in the UK to start "3". I worked for Orange at a time when they were in the process of "switching ideologies" from the incredibly laid back Hutchison to the bog-standard unimaginative bureaucracy of France Telecom. One of the "old guard"'s obsessions was with "churn rate" - Orange were massively proud that when the year came to an end, the vast majority of customers renewed their contracts. Customer Services was called "Customer Experience Delivery" - to emphasise that they wanted their customers to put the phone down after talking to you and think "I'm glad I signed up with Orange - they're REALLY nice people!" Everyone started out in "Billing" and worked their way up from there. SO, if (as a techie) you got a highly te | | | |