Phones & mobiles

As 2011 closes, I've been using the giffgaff mobile network for a couple of months. Although the £15 I was paying O2 each month hardly broke the bank, I was not getting particularly good value for it, and with the likelihood I would soon buy a smartphone, data charges were liable to rise substantially. Yes, I could have held off and bought a new smartphone on a 24-month contract, but with monthly outlays of the order of £30 or more for a decent call/text/data bundle, it wasn't a compelling option when I did the maths that the network operators pray you won't.

So I jumped ship from O2 to giffgaff, which was a technically safe move to make since giffgaff runs on the O2 network, so I wasn't anticipating (and haven't experienced) any particular reception issues. Transferring my number to giffgaff was painless enough, the only problem being getting the requisite PAC out of O2 in the first place since their customer service is woeful and they hate giffgaff undercutting their business.

Undercutting - yes, with PAYG calls at 10p a minute and texts at 6p, and the option to dip into month-long "goodybag" bundles when you please. There are various options for the latter, with straightforward ones like £10 for 250 minutes and unlimited texts and handset data browsing, to more exotic offerings like £5 for 60 minutes and 300 texts but with the twist that you get extra minutes when people call you. The potential catch with giffgaff is a double-edged sword: there is no customer service hotline. O2's proved worthless when it mattered, so for me that was no hardship, but some are uncomfortable with the idea of only having email contact in the event of account or billing issues. The other edge of that sword is that there is a lively and very helpful community forum, where most set-up issues and other queries are dealt with in minutes - and, still better, those helping out get paid up to £30 a month. There are also generous referrer bonuses if other people sign up via your account, making it quite possible to effectively get completely free service. Talking of free, calls and texts to other giffgaff members are free so long as you top up every three months, and 0800 numbers are free full-stop as they should be but rarely are on mobile networks.

Any problems? For me, not a jot. For others joining recently, there have been a few cases of slow number porting and issues with topping up and buying goodybags, but one has to remember that these problems afflict all networks to some extent; giffgaff by virtue of its community lays this open for all to see rather than hiding it behind faceless call centres. The website is in a bit of a state of change, and by the very nature of the service it is rather the hub of operations, so can be a little frustrating from time to time. But I should emphasise that my handset service has been rock solid from day one, and that's the main thing.

In a nutshell, I like the flexible contract-style pricing on PAYG terms, substantially limiting the financial risks should my phone ever get lost or stolen, and I love payback!

Rating: 4/5 [likely to be upped to 5/5 once website issues have stabilised]

The W800i replaced my 6210e and is about as different as you can get while remaining in a conventional "candy-bar" form - i.e. no flip, swivel, double pike or a pen to lose, and fully operable whilst in a protective case. Full colour, Java, Bluetooth, two-megapixel autofocus camera, and to cap it all, a Walkman-branded mp3/AAC media player. As a phone it seems fine, though having loads more options than the 6210e it's a little more complicated to navigate and will take some getting used to. Text-messaging in particular is somehow not quite as slick as with Nokia's software. The media player is no iPod substitute, but sounds good to excellent depending on the headphones used - the supplied (grey, not mugger-magnet white, though slightly awkwardly cabled in order to make the supplied wired hands-free usable) ear-buds essentially give highly acceptable sound with fair bass but accentuate a bit of mid-range hiss and crackle in a way that superior headphones and hi-fi auxiliary inputs etc don't, and that the equaliser on the player is unable to compensate for. I understand that the interference has come and gone with different firmware revisions, is as a result of a fix for a distortion bug, and used to be worse - though was not present in yet earlier versions. For general listening though the media player is great, and a useful touch is that it is usable independently from the telephone functionality - ideal for use on aeroplanes, in hospitals etc and in workplaces like mine with strict security policies precluding mobile phones being turned on. A USB-accessible 512MB Memory Stick Duo is provided to store music, pictures and more, upgradable to 2GB - not quite up to iPod Nano standard, alas. I have fitted a 2GB card I bought from eBay (don't pay hugely inflated retail prices!) and there's space for 40 or more albums at reasonable sound quality. The camera boasts two megapixels and, unusually, features auto-focus and a powerful LED "flash" illuminator (doubling up as a handy emergency torch!), though the quality (especially indoors with the LED) is more like what might be expected from a good one megapixel dedicated camera, and the best-quality JPEG file sizes of 300-400KB reflect this. There is also a bit of distortion at the corners of the image, but the small lenses on most camera-phones will always be a bit of a compromise. One bug that might well be fixed at some point (it has been for the essentially similar K750i) is that the camera doesn't take the photograph at the same time as the "shutter click", and momentarily displays a misleading preview - not too good when photographing moving subjects. Sony Ericsson have included their usual mini clickable joystick (dropped on later models, however, in favour of a more reliable rocker pad and separate "select" button), which takes a little getting used to and does not accelerate the user interface learning process. Some will not like the quirky cream and metallic orange colour scheme, but I do. The updated W810i is more conventionally coloured but broadly the same apart from reduced internal memory and no protection for the camera lens - the latter perhaps because the slide switch to open the lens cover on the W800i presents problems with many carry cases, including the one I have. Overall, not bad for the first "Walkman phone", though the USB connection is rather slow and they could have paid a little closer attention to details of the media player given its household-name branding.

Rating: 4/5

This was my first mobile phone, and it lasted me many years, propping up Orange (by whom it is branded) rather generously considering the upgrade incentives they didn't offer me. But I wouldn't have kept it so long if it didn't do its job rather well. It's ultimately a pretty simple phone, letting you talk, text, WAP browse and play a couple of simple games and not a lot more, but for those tasks it's very usable and a nice size for average hands and heads. So no Java, no colour, no polyphonic ring-tones or anything fancy like that. It does have its flaws though. For one reason or another it has always had a tendency to reset itself, and when it does, the keylock remains off (there being no auto-lock option) and people have consequently been known to be phoned by my pocket. The accessory connector is a bit flimsy and doesn't always make reliable contact, which was an issue for me given that for some time I was using the phone as a modem with my computer - a task which although slow, worked well, especially since it cost me next to nothing with the contract I was on, and earned me tens of thousands of points on the now-defunct Orange Equity scheme. As always it was the battery that finally gave up the ghost; it still works, but does not hold its charge well and I suspect has dodgy contacts contributing to random power-offs. So it was time to wave an old friend goodbye.

Rating: 3/5

Something went wrong with our previous cordless phone, so we bought this one to replace it a couple of years ago. It works well enough (and call clarity is typically good for a digital cordless, even if somehow never quite as good as might be expected) but the display can be a bit cryptic, especially given the number of set-up options etc that can be configured. It doesn't ring very loudly though, so it's perhaps as well that we have another phone upstairs (which rings altogether more clearly) to increase the chances of hearing and getting to a phone in time! Cheap and cheerful, ultimately, and although not BT's finest by any means (no matter how bad they may sometimes seem as a telecoms provider, the hardware they select to re-badge is generally very good) it certainly doesn't tarnish their reputation.

Rating: 3/5

Our home office phone sometimes used to bleep inexplicably in the middle of the night, so with BT now offering caller display free of charge to residential customers as part of their commitment to privacy (though at the time of writing they still charge to block troublesome numbers), we decided to replace it with just about the cheapest brand-name phone with caller display that we could find. For the money, we also get a speakerphone, but it's pretty poor sound quality "both ways" - the microphone really isn't sufficiently sensitive, and the speaker hums a lot when increased to a reasonable volume. It also rather annoyingly takes three (an odd number in every way) AAA batteries, with no option to run from a mains adapter - and without this battery power it claims not to work at all, rather than just disabling the extra features. There is a faint audible clicking on the line that is not evident with our other telephone, but it's hard to say whether it's a problem with the phone or over-sensitivity perhaps to our ADSL broadband connection. We got it primarily for its caller display functions, of course, and they work well (much better than our BT cordless phone, though the LCD screen can be a little hard to read from some angles) although the instructions for saving incoming numbers in the phone book don't work so they need to be manually entered retrospectively. Overall, for the very low price it's acceptable, but there are undoubtedly much better models out there for not much more money.

Rating: 2/5