Pocket Picks :: The coolest things for the coolest phones

With mobile internet use on the rise, we decided to spend some time digging through the websites of the UK operators, trying to make sense of the various data plans on offer. Data plans are the tariffs or add-ons you opt for when you want to use your mobile for internet browsing (and other online shenanigans).

To cut a long story short, our search became a head-spinning stumble through the land of confusion; a land where ‘unlimited’ really means ‘limited’, where charges for business users are often clearer than for the rest of us, and where packages, bundles, add-ons and free trials are order of the day.

Read on to find out where our adventures took us, and what we discovered.

T-Mobile (www.t-mobile.co.uk)
This and 3’s X-Series turned out to be the easiest sites and offers to get our heads around. T-Mobile makes life simple-ish by offering a series of talk, text and data packages that it calls ‘Web ‘n’ Walk’. These deals, which are straightforward add-ons to T-Mobiles ‘Flext’ talkplans, offer ‘unlimited’ internet access and email — up to a limit of 1GB of data each month. To be fair, that’s quite a lot of data to be chucking around, and even if you go over the limit all that will happen initially is that you’ll be warned not to do it again.

We looked at deals for the Nokia N95 (our current tariff benchmark) on T-Mobile, and found that the phone costs £89.99 up-front on the £35-per-month ‘Flext-35′ tariff, which gets you a claimed £180 of credit each month (the company claims this is equivalent to 900 minutes or 1800 texts — so 450 minutes and 900 texts if you do a simple 50/50 split). But if you opt instead for the £42.50-per-month Flext35 + Web ‘n’ Walk package the handset price drops to £59.99 — effectively making the first four months of web use free-of-charge.

We liked the simplicity of Web ‘n’ Walk, and if you consider that T-Mobile’s internet charges are usually up to £1-a-day then £7.50 for the month — if you’re going to use it — isn’t bad.

However! As with many of the other operators, T-Mobile does not dig voice-over-IP calls (Skype-style), saying that, ‘We do not permit use of this service to provide modem access for a computer or for peer to peer file sharing, internet phone calls or instant messaging.’ So that’s a lot of the fun/ interesting stuff you might want to do knocked on the head.

3 and X-Series (www.three.co.uk)
Also relatively straightforward — once you know where to look — is the X-Series range of mobiles and tariffs from 3. Tucked away after ‘Pay As You Go’ on the navigation bar of the 3 site, the X-Series is probably the most progressive mobile data offering currently available in the UK.

Again making heavy use of the word ‘unlimited’ and again proving that to be a complete fib (Trading Standards Authority, are you on a tea break or something?), the X-Series doesn’t shy away from the things that make mobile internet cool. Skype internet calling is not only allowed it comes pre-installed. eBay auction tracking is included. Streaming movies and music over services like Orb and Slingbox are also promoted for the X-Series service.

But again there’s a 1GB-per-month ‘fair use’ data policy, which you’re more likely to chew-through if being encouraged to watch TV and make Skype calls on your phone. However, 3 claims that you’ll be able to watch up to 80 hours of streamed TV per month, and to be fair we can’t see ourselves watching three hours of TV on our mobiles every day.

Currently being heavily promoted for the service is Nokia’s E65, which is a fairly good (if slightly business-oriented) Nseries-ish handset. The handset comes free on several X-Series tariffs, including the top-line X-Series Gold tariffs (which include the Orb and Slingbox streaming), which run you £35 or £45 per month for 300 mins and 150 texts, or 300 mins and 1000 texts respectively. We’re guessing that 3 is expecting you to use Skype for a lot of calls, hence the low-ish minute allowances.

Orange (www.orange.co.uk)
Our foray into the Orange site was much less successful at figuring out what exactly is on offer. There are various sections related to ‘mobile email’ (see here), ‘mobile & broadband’ (which is mainly about Orange’s broadband offer), a promising looking bit called ‘email & communicate’ that seems mostly to do with stuff on Orange’s own website… But nothing clear about mobile internet. Launching Orange’s epic ‘terms and conditions‘ page doesn’t help much either; we tried a quick search for ‘mobile email’ and nothing came up.

We couldn’t find much in the tariffs section, either. There is a ‘TRY 3G’ offer that gives free access to mobile internet (with that ‘unlimited’ 1GB data limit again), for the first two months of a new contract.

Eventually, buried in the ‘help & support’ pages (which we accessed through the site map), we found this page which carries details of Orange’s 3G deal. The costs section reveals that pay-monthly customers can add ‘unlimited’ evening and weekend browsing (although there’s no definition on the page of what times the deal kicks in/ out) for £5 per month. Browsing during the day costs up to a maximum of £1.50 per day extra.

As with the operators, just don’t, whatever you do, use Orange’s 3G roaming, unless you happen to be a squillionaire. We dug up another page which seemed to suggest data charges of around £6 PER MEGABYTE used. That’s the equivalent of £6000 for one of those ‘unlimited’ 1GBs.

Vodafone (www.vodafone.co.uk)
Compared to the 1GB deals offered by the other operators, Vodafone’s 120MB per month for £7.50 seems slightly stingy. But in an attempt to show you how generous that allowance is, someone at Vodafone has, rather helpfully, created an online tool to estimate how much data you’ll use each month (shown at the top of this somewhat enormous post — click here to visit the page).

The only thing is, Vodafone claims that, ‘Standard web pages use about 0.1MB of your allowance.’ We read that and thought, ‘Hmm… Really?’ and decided to run a few tests. It turned out that, on the day of our exploration, the front page of Pocket Picks was using over 0.6MB. Not bad going, except Engadget beat us with nearly 0.8MB, while the BBC News page used nearly 0.3MB. And seeing how Vodafone’s own homepage was nearly 0.4MB, we’re curious to know where this 0.1MB figure has come from.

Vodafone is also anti-non internet browsing (having recently caused an uproar when it infamously crippled the N95’s voip software). Using Skype, Windows Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger or similar services will incur additional hefty charges of £2 per MB — which sounds a bit like a corporate way of saying, ‘bugger off.’

Vaguely on the upside, Vodafone doesn’t count access to the Vodafone live! or Mobile Internet homepages, and if you buy a ringtone from the former then the download isn’t counted against your 120MB limit. How vastly generous!

O2 (www.o2.co.uk)
We had a real struggle with O2’s site. Unlike Orange or Vodafone, there’s no obvious way of finding out anything related to mobile internet use unless you’re a business user (see these pages). The ‘business data for individuals’ pages revealed that you can page £21.74 (inc. VAT) for 75MB of data use — which seems somewhat pricey.

All we could dig up for personal use was the following message: ‘All standard consumer tariffs offer 1MB of browsing inclusive. After that it’s £3 per MB.’ Seeing as how that was tagged to an ‘Online 50′ £50-per-month 18-month tariff, we were surprised at how high the per-MB charges were, and how tiny the inclusive data was.

Based on what we could glean from its site, O2 definitely came out bottom in our online research session. There seems little or no emphasis on mobile internet — either in terms of offering services (like Orange and Vodafone), or in terms of progressive data plans (like T-Mobile and 3).

In conclusion
If you’re serious about mobile internet use, it would seem that T-Mobile and 3 offer the simplest, clearest ways of getting online while you’re out and about. Orange’s £5-per-month deal also seems good if you’re unlikely to use the service during in the working week. Vodafone’s 120MB-per-month limit for £7.50 simply doesn’t stack up against other offerings, but we think O2’s apparent disinterest in mobile internet and £3 per MB charge for additional data places it bottom of the pops in the mobile internet world.

If you can find a handset to your liking among the 3 range then X-Series does appear to be the most forward-thinking service out there, with Skype and streaming music and TV encouraged. We’ve not had hands-on use of X-Series service, and there may be those of you out there who’ve chosen it and are disappointed with what’s on offer. However, based on the deals we’ve seen today we would recommend that X-Series is at least worth a good, hard look if you’re interested in exploring the 3G, mobile internet world.