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Was launched on O2 only at £42 a month, totally bombed. Now down to £27 a month and a frankly insane £399 on PAYG still locked to O2. I pop in now and again to see if the price has dropped anymore and last time I was there the chap who knows me by now said they had sold one since Christmas. https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/phones/amazon/fire-phone/

The online account username and password (i.e. billing and support; this is the one I store in LastPass and, since you only use it on the ISP's website I would never consider that I might need it when I don't have internet access) and the connection username and password (i.e. what the router uses to connect to ADSL) have been two separate things with every ISP I have been with.

In fact I just checked my old ISP's support pages and they didn't even use login credentials for the connection for most of their customers (those on LLU exchanges): http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRV...

I would enquire about 4G coverage in Scotland before thinking about a phone that can access 4G in Europe... ;-)

Looks O.K to me.

Enter
http://periodensystem.com/
in
http://urlchecker.o2.co.uk/urlcheck.aspx

and see. There is even a category for this: science.
[sarcasm]I agree science is evil. But wouldn't it be more efficient to close schools or give them into the hands of creationists?
oh, wait, the governments are working on that issue. [/sarcasm]

Oh, wait, even XKCD is blocked according to http://urlchecker.o2.co.uk/. Even wikipedia is blocked.

Probably the people behind this wants that the UK population be at least as stupid as them. In the race to the bottom there is no winner.

0845 is not local rate. 0870 is not national rate. There is no such thing as local rate or national rate in the UK.
If you call a geographical number (beginning 01, 02 or 03), it costs the same no matter whereabouts you, and the person you are calling are located in the UK. If you call any other sort of UK number, it costs the same no matter whereabouts you and the person you are calling are located within the UK. You pay more to call another country, but within the UK, distance does not matter. Having said that, most people use alternative carriers or something like Skype for international calls, and effectively pay the cost of a local call in the country they are calling when making international calls.

0845 and 0870 are special rate numbers that cost more to call than geographical numbers.

Here is an example of what you are charged on one tariff: http://www.o2.co.uk/o2basic
Calls to geographical numbers cost 15p per minute. Calls to special rate numbers including 0845 and 0870 cost 25p per minute.

For most people, calls to geographical numbers are effectively free, because they have a tariff that includes bundled minutes. They can't use those bundled minutes on special rate numbers, so they have to pay something like 25p per minute from a mobile or 5p - 10p per minute from a landline.

For a true emergency phone, I'd expect to get a pay-as-you-go phone and top it up by the minimum amount (£5?) once a year or so to keep the SIM active. (I was given a phone for emergencies when I was about 14, in 2000. The phone was about £30, calls were about 50p/minute, but I hardly ever needed to make one.)

I have a German SIM (I go there once or twice a year). The network sends me a text after about 6 months of inactivity, telling me I have a further 12 months before the SIM is disconnected.

$50/£30 is about what a normal contract with a smartphone included costs. See https://www.o2.co.uk/browsing/tariffs/apple/iphone-5-16gb-black/ for examples with an iPhone, I think most people with iPhones probably get something like that.

SIM-only contracts in the UK are somewhat cheaper than ones that include a handset subsidy (between half and two thirds).
Then again, it seems like the US is a special case; apparently no-one else screws one over quite as hard as an American mobile phone company.

Whoa, slow down there!

Never mind rolling out a 4G network, a lot of the cellular/mobile networks in the UK can't even provide a decent 3G service!

I'm with O2, and in a built-up populous city and at least 50% of the time I find that I have an incredibly poor 3G signal. This figure doubles when I go indoors.

Let's try and make the 3G signal better first before we start jumping onto the "next big thing". Or if 4G really is the saviour of 3G's ills, let's get rid of 3G and have the networks provide all us consumers with free upgrades to 4G!

No, BT's range of competing ISPs will get a lot more popular. Virtually everyone who can get BT can get one of those and be switched over to them in two weeks (just switched to O2 from BT, best move I ever made - BT are retards).

I'm no particular fan of TPB, I think they're a bunch of dicks, but for christ's sake blocking access is not the answer for the British record industry. Legal downloads, although markedly less profitable, are still something of a money-spinner for them, and given some of the shite that has reached No.1 recently they must be selling something...

Typical.

Samsung gets away with copying the distinctive look of the iPhone* to an extent that most other smartphone vendors have managed to avoid.

Then they get done for infringing a stupid software patent about scrolling photos, which shouldn't even exist in Europe but has been sneaked in dressed up as a hardware patent, which could be a royal pain for anybody trying to make a smartphone.

* Forget Apple's allegedly doctored/cherry-picked images - just have a look at a random phone vendor's page and see which ones look just like the iPhone... and blow me down, why are O2 using Apple's "fake" image of the Galaxy S: you know, the one that displaying the grid of icons instead of the Android home screen? Apart, perhaps, from the HTC HD7, all the other phones manage to incorporate the essential features of a touchscreen smartphone without looking just like an iPhone.

Am I understanding you correctly? You're bitching because the default android app picker is on the screen, instead of the home screen? Why not get bent out of shape if I show a picture of my phone playing streaming audio with the Pandora app, for the sake of being utterly retarded? Barring that, what would you suggest for a method of displaying the applications available on an electronic device, aside from using the familiar "icons" that almost any user will understand to be a small picture that starts the application when touched?

I mean, really?
For serious?

Typical.

Samsung gets away with copying the distinctive look of the iPhone* to an extent that most other smartphone vendors have managed to avoid.

Then they get done for infringing a stupid software patent about scrolling photos, which shouldn't even exist in Europe but has been sneaked in dressed up as a hardware patent, which could be a royal pain for anybody trying to make a smartphone.

* Forget Apple's allegedly doctored/cherry-picked images - just have a look at a random phone vendor's page and see which ones look just like the iPhone... and blow me down, why are O2 using Apple's "fake" image of the Galaxy S: you know, the one that displaying the grid of icons instead of the Android home screen? Apart, perhaps, from the HTC HD7, all the other phones manage to incorporate the essential features of a touchscreen smartphone without looking just like an iPhone.

I switched the other way (to android) last year. I owned a palm pre for a year and absolutely hated it. Yes, the OS is nice and I liked the cards user interface however, the actual "phone" capability was shocking and the phone system would shut down and I'd only realise some hours later when no calls had come through. it wouldn't switch between 3G, HSPDA and 2G cleanly, often failing completely (even during a call in good signal area) and rebooting (which is a nightware where I live in a hilly area because the signal strength fluctuates as cell towers come into line of sight.)

whilst the touchstone was cool, you'd be using it a lot since the battery would last 6 to 8 hours and if you charged it directly using the micro usb then the little plastic cap would eventually fall off. Often, after charging, the data storage would not be accessible.

the webos "market" is different for each region and had a lot more carrier influence than android market and itunes store. The community did sort this out by offering homebrew solutions, but it took time and a lot of patience.

If you look at the O2 UK palm pre forum when they came out - you'll see endless customers venting their frustrations at a system with such poor quality hardware that it really didn't matter how technically good the OS was. Also, O2 Uk made a bit of a cockup with the support of this phone, see the Reg article about unlocking sims

Maybe their intent is to stop matrix scams, dutch auctions etc. but I don't see how it would help there either. People running these scams are hardly likely to care what Apple thinks.

Finally, if they're cracking down on the term "free", why not do it where everyone knows the term is abused - phone contracts. i.e. Get a FREE iphone when you sign up for some ludicrous 2 year contract and so on. In the example link's case the free phone merely requires the user pay £1512 to receive it and service, and that doesn't even include any data!

Many deployments of the IWF censorship list in the UK use a 404 Not Found rather than 403. I've never found any official explanation for this, though I've read suggestions that it's to make people just assume that censored content isn't available rather than tip them off that it's being hidden from them.

I don't know what US military policy is, but it gives you an idea of how censors in the Western world think.

What are you talking about? O2 offer 30 day and 12 month SIM-only tariffs. You only have to sign up for an 18- or 24-month tariff if you want a new, generally subsidised, handset.

Apple has (for all intents and purposes) one phone on one carrier.

Some of us live in Europe, you insensitive clod!

If you got your iphone from o2 in the uk, then unlocking is a simple matter of going to http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/unlockmyiphone.html and entering your details...

1.) unlocking experience on the iPhone: 2 days wasted trying to get a jail break going. 3rd day included a visit to a seedy 3rd party phone shop that advertised jailbreaking iPhones. Always in danger of undoing it all via iTunes that persistently tries to offer an upgrade for the phone.

Being given an unlocked phone (or an easy way to unlock it) is something you should check when you buy the phone. For example, O2 will unlock it.

Granted, the iPhone makes this more complicated.

I think this is a pretty good idea. There are a lot of people who are unable to make online purchases - they can't get plastic for a variety of reasons, same with PayPal - and it can be a serious disadvantage.

The only problem I envisage is children spending money they shouldn't, and parents having to foot the bill. The $25 limit is one way to tackle this; another would be to make it an opt-in service that can be authorized only by an adult; maybe even limiting the service to prepay (pay as you go) accounts, so it is impossible to spend money you don't already have in the account, similar to how a debit card works. But I can't imagine the cellphone companies will want to erect too many hoops for their customers to jump through.

Incidentally, this isn't a completely new idea. O2 in the UK have something similar called Cash Manager, and Vodafone in Egypt have Vodafone Cash. I'm sure there are other examples too. But these are more on the lines of debit cards that are linked to the phone account. However, I do have a vague memory of something like this being set up in the UK, by Vodafone I think. A quick google didn't turn up anything about it, though I'm sure someone else will be more successful in hunting for a reference.

No idea about US delivery, customs, or pre-paid network availability, but you certainly won't be able to roam cheaply on the T-mobile US network with a UK SIM. I think the unlocking fee is under 20GBP (haven't checked this), so you could potentially use it on any network, but you'd have to check if the local 3G frequency is supported (it's quad band for 2G).

'the PAYG iPhone...Doesn't exist.'

Does here:

http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/iphoneindex/Pay_And_Go/3G_S

The 16Gb 3Gs on PAYG is 440 GBP (in comparison the 8Gb Touch is 149 GBP, the 16Gb is 229 GBP, the T-Mobile Pulse is 137 GBP, and an 8Gb micro SD is 10 GBP).

I disagree with that. I live in a rural part of Hampshire, I used to use O2, but I switched to Three for better speeds.

The Register had an article in July with the coverage maps for different mobile companies; Three and Orange came out best.

For a tourist, I'd suggest that Three's pay-and-go dongle would be the best option.

The mobile network operator o2 (who have many stores around London) offer pay-as-you-go 3G mobile broadband dongles for £30. Although other companies offer mobile broadband, only o2 offer a 14 day money back guarantee on it, so you if you want to be cheeky you could in theory get your £30 back. You can buy the modem at any o2 shop.

You also get free access to many o2 ("cloud") hotspots which are the most commonly found wi-fi zones in pubs, shops, restaurants and cafes.

http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/o2mobilebroadband/tab/Pay_and_Go

It think there's and iPhone app which tells you how close you are to one of them.

A little originally failed research on my part reveals OpenPeak is an OEM.

Distributors include 02 selling "The Joggler" in England and Verizon calls theirs "The Hub". Apparently Telefonica and Swisscom distribute them as well.

There usually is, from the mobile operator's website.

Oh, look what I found! Just because the great unwashed don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Oh you mean in a similar way that O2 (a UK mobile company) started doing in the UK recently with their Cash Manager card?

O2 Cash Manager - "You load money onto the card, (using your phone or other methods) then whenever you use it you'll receive a free real time text alert. This will tell how much money you've loaded, spent or withdrawn, and how much you've got left. Simple."

Tethering is available in the UK, but you have to pay a 'bolt-on' fee which is only a penny cheaper than their most expensive pay monthly (=no contract) USB dongle, even though the monthly contract includes 'unlimited internet'. Nice of them to support their loyal customers like that.

O2 are charging £14.68 a month for tethering, with a 3GB cap or £29.36 for 10GB. It's not available on Pay & Go. http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/internet.html

O2 in the UK will be supporting tethering on the iPhone as an add on to their contracts.

Contracts start at 29.38 GBP (approx 48 USD) for an 18 month contract. Tethering starts at 14.68 GBP (approx 24 USD) extra for a 3GB package.

Details at: http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/internet.html

You mean this O2 store? The one with the "iPhone" link in the "Phones" menu on the left hand side?

O2 are my mobile service provider (owned by BT)

O2 aren't owned by BT. They're part of the Telefonica group.

• 8GB Pay as you Go on O2 - £342.33p, including 12 months unlimited data and wifi.
• 16GB Pay as you Go on O2 - £391.27p, including 12 months unlimited data and wifi.

http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/iphoneindex/Pay_And_Go/3G

and also a couple of ISP's who do uncapped and unfiltered for less such as http://www.bethere.co.uk/ and http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/index.jsp

And your cell provider will become your ISP. And all will be right with the world.

In the UK at least, that already happens.

As I'm from Britain, I looked at Three, T-Mobile, O2, Orange, and Vodafone.

The ones you link to are CDMA modems, which only work in US, Canada and one or two other countries. The rest of the world uses GSM based networks, and the modems for them are USB.

I would expect to be able to phone O2 after 2 years of ownership and say "unlock this, please" and have them do it. Mind you, I'd also expect within 12 months to be bored stupid of my handset and have changed it for something else, and I expect their 2 year contract (which is otherwise unheard of in the UK) takes this into account and expects most users to swap out for an iPhone gen 3 in a year, and further extend their contract.

Ofcom's rules state that once the subsidy period is up, the operator has to allow the device to be unlocked.

We know the iPhone can be unlocked, because it's sold unlocked (or unlockable for a fee) in other countries.

We'll find out in about 9 months when the very earliest contracts are up.

I don't know if the PAYG iPhone is network-locked (not sure what you mean about it being pulled: http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paygo ), but as it's unsubsidised, O2 are legally required to provide you with an unlocking code if it is.

Check out http://www.o2.co.uk/termsconditions/iphone

O2 Web & Wi-Fi Bolt On terms & conditions
3. The O2 Web and Wi-Fi Bolt On allows you unlimited use of O2 UK's Edge, GPRS, 3G and HSDPA networks, The Cloud's UK Wireless LAN network and the BT Openzone UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use and email on your iPhone only. All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes. You may not use your SIM Card in any other device or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other O2 customers.

Even if they did retract their fair-usage policy that certinaly sounds like a catch-all "we define what adversely impacts the service" type statement that's the staple of ISP FUPs everywhere.

"Europe you can buy a phone with "pay as you go" contract. You can't with the iPhone."

Yes you can, at least if you regard the UK as being part of Europe:

http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paygo

Wrong - look at the bottom of O2's iPhone page http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paymonthly - "Excessive usage policy and full terms apply"

That refers specifically to the free Wifi service through the Cloud and BT Openzone and not 3G usage.

This was extensively covered in the media when the original iPhone was released. They tried to put on a fair usage policy, the customer complained. They took it off. Presumably thinking: "fuck it - without tethering they won't use that much data any way."

No apologies necessary.

In the UK, O2 provide unlimited data with no fair usage policy for the iPhone. Every other 3G device they support has data limits and strict fair usage policies.

Wrong - look at the bottom of O2's iPhone page http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paymonthly - "Excessive usage policy and full terms apply"

I think the Wifi deal if for the iPhone only, the Edge/3G deal for any phone: http://www.o2.co.uk/mobilestariffs/tariffs/paygo/o2webbolton I've used it with a standard O2 SIM before. The EDGE/3G deal is only 7.50

You're the second poster to suggest this, so I went and took a look at O2. Their £10/month bolt-on is to use with an original iPhone only. I'd prefer to use my existing phone, which supports tethering with my laptop or 770 via Bluetooth.

They've removed the html files:
http://mediamessaging.o2.co.uk/mms2legacy/showMessage2.do?encMmsId=4CFD8D89D9731663
But not the media files:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:da2lzIzhTUAJ:mediamessaging.o2.co.uk/mms2legacy/showMessage2.do%3FencMmsId%3D4CFD8D89D9731663+inurl:mms2legacy&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21

No robots.txt
http://mediamessaging.o2.co.uk/robots.txt

Nothing is telling Google (or Yahoo, or ...) not to index a page somebody linked to on some other page.

Even if O2 did prevent indexing of these webpages the leak still exists. I'm able to find keys due to a security hole in O2's servers and I'll update the blog with the full details after giving O2 time to respond. Here's an example if you don't believe me: http://mediamessaging.o2.co.uk/mms2legacy/showMessage2.do?encMmsId=66544E5699B42021 You will NOT find that indexed on Google or any other websearch.

These MMS messages also show any text and the senders phone number. For example this one has text, several photos and a mobile phone number: http://mediamessaging.o2.co.uk/mms2legacy/showMessage2.do?encMmsId=4DC8E22F33EFC13C

This should be easy to fix with some authentication, I guess o2 will get onto this soon before the mainstream media catch on.

O2 Customer Forums - Luckily I posted this after everyone went home, so they didn't get to delete my post or account this time.

it costs twice what this year's iPhone does

How do you figure that out?

The new 8GB iPhone costs £639 (£99 + £30 / month for 18 months: http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paymonthly), whilst the Freerunner will cost about £272 (up-front cost, no contract: https://www.truebox.co.uk/trueboxportal/index.php?wk=Openmoko).