Author: Charles March

In these economically challenged times, we all like to think we are getting something for free, or at least if not for free, then that we are getting a bit of a bargain.

Mobile phone contracts seem to offer the consumer just this. A brand new mobile phone, packed full of the latest technological wizardry, that would cost you several hundred pounds if you were to buy it direct from the manufacturer, can be yours for a huge discount, or possibly, depending on the terms of the contract you are prepared to commit to, for free.

All you have to do is sign up with a contract supplier to pay a monthly subscription for the next twelve, eighteen or twenty four months, and the new phone is yours, and you also get a set amount of calling time, and other extras, such as free texts.

As you are going to be using those calling minutes and texts anyway, this sounds like, free to, a good deal. Well it may be, but you should still do your sums carefully, free to, .

Take the new Nokia N97, a phone that Nokia will sell to you for £499. At the time of the launch, you could get a free N97 handset when you signed up to a contract with 700 ‘any time’ minutes a month paying £35 a month, as long as you were prepared to commit to paying this for the next 24 months. So your free phone will actually cost you £840 over that time frame (24 months at £35).

Or to look at it another way, you are going to pay £840 in installments, free to, .

The phone would cost you £499, so the difference, £341 is the cost of your mobile calls over the next 2 years (assuming you use all of the 700, free to, minutes a month and no more). That works out at about £0.02 per minute.

In addition to the 700 minutes talk time, there are 250 texts a month included in the package, and if you are a, free to, high user of text messages this is another benchmark to use to compare the package value.

All in all. that sounds like a good deal!

Prices and deals were correct at the time of writing, but you can check on the latest prices and deals for the Nokia N97

Charles March has been writing about technology and mobile phones since mobiles started being used for more than just communicating.

Source: ezinearticles.com