I’ve got a contract phone that got water damaged last week and is now ‘flaky’ to say the least. The contract’s up at Christmas when I can good a good new one but I need a stopgap, so I went into a high street retailer to check prices out for buying the phone sim free. But then it appears you can get a better price by paying for a payg phone even including the minimum £10 starting top up. So I asked if I did that, bought the phone on the same network as my contract, could I just put my existing sim card in. And the shop bloke wouldn’t tell me. Another customer (half my age) intervened and said it would, or I could unlock it anyway for a fiver or so. At which the shop bloke then said he’d refuse to sell me a payg one now anyway, because that’s not how they are intended to be used and he’d lose money by doing it.

Really? What i am missing here. He won’t be getting the business when the contracts up either now.

Does the shop get commission when you top up then? I would have thought the network subsidises the handset so that you then spend money for minutes/texts on their network. So I would have thought that the shop wouldn’t care what you did with the phone, as long as you bought it.

Now you know what you can do, stuff him, and go somewhere else. He’s working to a script, and has no leeway to use common sense.

Mobile phones either on contract or on PAYG (but to a lesser extent) are subsidised by the network to which you buy it on.

So an O2 PAYG phone will be cheaper than a sim free one (generally speaking) as O2 are paying toward the cost of the handset on the basis that you will be buying airtime from them.

I would imagine that the shop assistant is under instructions not to divulge information about unlocking etc as the networks may be a little upset at the loss of revenue.

Note – *Most* carphonewarehouse phones are unlocked but they still sell the PAYG deals (particularly those to be used on O2, Vodafone and Virgin. Orange / EE are still sometimes locked down).

AFAIK, apart from iPhones, all O2 phones are unlocked, so you can stick any SIM into them; I had two that I gave to a mate who’s on Orange, and he’s still using my old SE K750i, which must be getting on for ten years old now!
It’s not something they advertise, and I’m not sure about other networks, I just know O2 don’t/didn’t used to lock their phones.

You can’t always unlock phones for a fiver. It used to be the case, but I’ve not had an easily unlockable phone since 2005 or so.

I’m on Orange, so I’ll just get an phone with an Orange sim card anyway and then transfer mine in.

But first of course – I’ll have £10 of largely untraceable phone calls to make. Send me the number and message you want passed on……

Orange shop did that to my wife too, she said can I buy one of those phones and use my Orange sim card in it, they said no, and told her to go across the road to the independent phone shop, where they happily sold her a PAYG Orange phone.

Presumably their thought is that while you’re on contract, you’re not going to go away anyway, so no point in helping you out, but it annoyed her enough that for the next one she’s changing networks, so they lose in the end.

Can pick up stop gaps on ebay as well.

Yep – or on here, have emailed a couple of people who were advertising on the classifieds.

watch out for the multiplicity of different sizes of sim cards that different phones use nowadays…