Following on from the previous i-Phone thread I’ve decided to get one of these but do I:

pay close to £400 and get the phone to keep (but have to mess around with pay as you go) & expensive calls

or

go for contract and pay close to £700 over 18 months, have free calls, but don’t get to keep the phone at the end?

Every contract I’ve had has meant I keep the phone at the end of the contract period- is the iPhone different?

Whats your monthly usage?

Didn’t realise you got to keep the phone at the end – makes quite a difference

haha fool! yeah you keep the phone, i got mine of the first day, there pretty crappy but better than anything else out.

what’s "crappy" about them ?

I’m on the £35 a month contract which seemed like the best compromise.
It gives you 600 minutes and 500 texts plus unlimited data.
On that contract the iPhone 16GB costs £155.

And yeah, they are generally fantastic devices but there are a great many things that could be better on them. See http://pleasefixtheiphone.com/

Mines been no bother so far, same contract as GrahamS

well if you have access to the computers they are listed as the cheapest phone cat you can have, they arnt built 1/2 as good as the older iphone its all gone plasticy and cheap… the software crashes often on a lot of random things, and the silent buttons snap off easy via no wrong doing.

like i say ive got one and i still believe its the best phone on the market but dont expect it to work aswell as some more basic phones.

cheers Graham – didn’t realise you couldn’t send mms

"well if you have access to the computers they are listed as the cheapest phone cat you can have"

not sure what you mean Alex?

the phone is classed as disposable basically, if it breaks they’d rather give you a new one.

oh yeah, no video, no mms (you can receive them if you go online, the cameras crappy, but theres lots of positives 🙂

alexx you’re putting me off getting one!

No video, no MMS, no cut-and-paste and a crap camera are the biggest issues really.

But the first three could be sorted by a future firmware update. I’ve heard the MMS restriction is purely because the networks got nervous about the amount of data it would be hitting them with.

If that list of "wanted" is accurate (ie they aren’t provided by the iPhone) I will be sticking with my Blackberry. I am really surprised at some of the missing functionality.

jfeb: they all look pretty accurate to me.

On the flip side, there are very good things. The interface is luvverly, browser is good, GPS works well, switching between WiFi and 3G is smooth and most importantly of all, there are thousands of apps available for it are more being written every week.

I’ve had my iPhone since November, so I have a little experience with it. It is, despite a few flaws, a remarkable devise, and I wouldn’t swap it for any other phone on the market. Previously I had a S/Ericsson K750i, an XDA Mini and a Nokia N95, and the iPhone is just so much easier to use. Web browsing with the XDA and the N95 was a joke, the supposedly superior camera on the N95 would almost never focus, I actually spent half an hour trying to take a couple of pics of my bike and only got one in focus, from five feet away! The satnav on the N95 was useless, I had to buy a BT receiver to be able to use ViewRanger, and a bigger battery to get even a day out of the phone. The iPhone camera ALWAYS focuses, and with some of the apps around like photolab and camerabag really nice pics can be taken. The satnav picks up almost immediately, it’s a brilliant ebook reader, and with apps like dictionaries, AtoZ’s, tube maps, weather, etc, make it more useful on a day to day basis than my computer. I browse this site with it, listen to Last FM and Wolfgangs Concert Vault, and, on occasion, actually make phone calls! Sure, it could do with MMS, but that is coming, apparantly, and it needs Flash, but that’s up to Adobe.
Blackberry’s are fine if you absolutely must get emails the moment they’re sent, but I get mine within ten minuits or so, which is fine, and I can email a pic if I need to. It can only get better and better, and unlike Americans, I get to keep my phone and put a PAYG sim in it when I upgrade to a new one, which will probably be 32gb by that time.
I really don’t think you’ll regret getting one for one second, plus you can get the Missing Manual from the Apps store for £2.99

I’ve just gone a small business Tariff (it seems that 02 are "flexible" on how thats used)

The phone was free, £42 a month gets me 500 minutes talk time, more texts than I’ll ever used and a additional FREE Iphone after 12 months (of a 24 month contract)

I’m really happy with the phone – the lack of wi-fi on the blackberry storm tipped me over the edge (and I use a Mac at home)

cheers everyone – small business tariff sounds good!
contract definitely seems the way to go given that you keep the phone 🙂

Also thinking about one of these, one of the guys here got one, and is most pleased with it. I was looking at the apps available last night and MMS is now available, so that is no longer an issue.

I been looking for a smart phone and the iphone/O2 seems to ahve the best data package. So if you want to use the internet I’d go contract.

Not made the plunge myself yet, still thinking…

I bought mine min May last year for £130. They’re great and i’ve found little reason to move to the 3G model.

Dumb question of the day. The WiFi bit, is WiFi different from the wireless signal I have from my Sky broadband router? Will I get a connection from that at home? Or does it have to be a special WiFi router thingy?

THe lack of MMS, cut/paste and message forwarding just didn’t make any sense to me when I was looking for a phone so I ended up with a HTC Touch………………this was a truly shocking device. It had all the functins you could ever need but just felt so cumbersome. I sent this back and took the plunge on an iPhone – wow, so impressed – it really is just so usable and intuative. You soon forget the small bits its lacking. If anything being a phone is just one very smal part of what it does – you’ll understand when you get one 😀

Marmite – No, yes and no

Dr Death, fantastic, guess a trip to the Apple Store on Sunday may be on the cards.

Oh yeah, Apple Store or O2 shop, either one better to deal with?

I was looking at the apps available last night and MMS is now available, so that is no longer an issue.

I take it you mean this: http://iphonemms.net/ ?

Be warned that this isn’t an O2 app. It sends the MMS via some third-party gateway and you have to pay for each one you send – they don’t come out of your text message budget. It’s around 40p per MMS. And it is only simple MMS – i.e. a picture, it doesn’t do video.

Still. Better than nothing.

Yes that is the one, I don’t use MMS much personally but that would do it at a push, they also state that they are looking at a way to get this to come from plan allowance, so guess a matter of time, not sure it is a deal breaker for me though, just use email to send the pic, that is what I mostly do at the moment from my K800i.

I can second Yoshimi’s experience, it’s excellent.

I really like my iPhone. The main gripe I have is not having a "turn by turn GPS" application such as TomTom. I would suggest that you get a better set of earphones to replace the standard Apple ones.

The main gripe I have is not having a "turn by turn GPS" application such as TomTom.

In the Maps application you can get directions and then press "Start" and it gives you it turn-by-turn.
Not nearly as good as a TomTom and it doesn’t speak, but better than nothing.

Yes, I use the maps application which is based on Google maps and is better than nothing. What I want is an in car SatNav. Apparently Tomtom have got it working on the iPhone but can’t agree terms with Apple. I don’t know if it’s the size of the app or the pricing/competition with Google that can’t be sorted out.

tyke: just buy a TomTom then. I’d rather have a dedicated device for in-car satnav. What happens if someone calls you at a critical intersection?

I bought the 16 gig iPhone on PAYG. I registered it to get the 12 months free wifi on TheCloud then unlocked it. I’m now using a cheap as chips from Three – they have by far the biggest 3g network as well as a free roaming deal with Orange to use their 3g and 2g network – so you get great coverage almost everywhere. The unlimited data on Three costs £5 a month.

Cool. You get 12 months unlimited data with O2 anyway, even on PAYG, but I guess the 3G coverage isn’t so hot.

i phones are **** nokia n8 the dogs lol