Because I had unusual plans — buying a Pay & Go phone and then switching to a 1-month rolling contract — I rang O2 twice before buying anything. I wanted to make sure that Visual Voicemail, unlimited wifi and tethering would work on a non-iPhone contract, and was assured that they would be.

After getting the phone, I found that Visual Voicemail didn’t work, and called O2, assuming it was a configuration problem… but no. They said Visual Voicemail and tethering are unavailable on anything other than an iPhone contract, which is not what they said before. I suggested some possible solutions to this:

Could you turn on these features without using an iPhone contract? Answer: No. Apparently it’s “technically impossible”.

Could you put me on an iPhone contract with an appropriate discount and no minimum term (since I already have the phone) Answer: No. “The system won’t let me do that.” — “Can I speak to someone who can authorise it?” — “No one could authorise that” — “What!?”

I had a bit of a go at the guy and was called back by a manager, who offered me a month’s free line rental to make up for it, but still. I felt pretty messed around, especially since i had taken so much care to ensure that everything would be ok. Ho hum.

In any case, I do now have the new iPhone, and it’s lovely (despite O2′s crummy 3G coverage), and I’m terribly happy with it. It is an awesome piece of kit: so awesome, it turns out, that it can even balance out the monumental crapness of mobile phone companies.

If only it was available to Orange customers…

Edited to add:

I forgot to mention that O2 were pretty rubbish even before I got my hands on the phone. I ordered it online on the Friday morning when it was released. The website asked me when I wanted when I wanted it to be delivered, so I picked a free slot on Monday morning. It didn’t arrive. My card was billed — all, I thought, was good. I rang O2, and they said it would arrive in the next couple of days.

On Tuesday, perhaps over-enthusiastically, I rang O2 again to ask when it would come, only to be told that they’d run out of stock and cancelled the order.

Beyond the initial confirmation email, I didn’t hear from them at all. They didn’t tell me a thing. #Fail.

I recently got the new iPhone 3GS. I wasn’t convinced by previous iPhones but this one, and the release of OS3, seemed to fix a lot of the problems with old models — copy & paste, video, HSDPA — as well as being thoroughly good-looking.

The one thing I don’t want ever again is an 18-month contract. I think they’re nuts. 18 months of lock-in in a sphere of technology where improvements seem to appear every 6 or 8 months just isn’t sensible, especially in a fiercely competetive market for service providers: I guarantee there’ll be much better tariffs available for new customers in a year than there are now.

So, I wanted to get hold of the phone without the contract. The obvious way to do it is to buy the phone on Pay & Go and then take out a rolling 1-month contract. I crunched the numbers and it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do, financially speaking. Over 18 months, the total cost is almost the same:

That’s for the 32Gb model. With the 16Gb model, SIM-only is actually slightly cheaper. But what do you get for your money?

My feeling is that SIM-only is definitely better. There’s no way to get visual voicemail, but that’s not a killer feature for me.

The lack of tethering is annoying, but not critical — partially since a dongle costs the same, but also because most of what I’d do with a tethered connection (email, twitter, the odd bit of web browsing) I can do on the phone almost as easily. That a dongle comes with unlimited wifi is a nice bonus, though I’m not sure how that’s managed: it might only work with the laptop, and not the phone, depending on how they authenticate people who are connecting to a hotspot.

Another nice plus is that with a dongle on SIM-only, you end up paying £35/mo — the same as what you’d pay on an iPhone contract without tethering — though the actual cost over 18 months is of course the same.

There is one caveat that’s worth mentioning: most mobile companies, presumably including O2, will actually let you change your tariff 15ish months into an 18 month contract. If you dropped down to the £20 iPhone tariff, that’d change the figures — but not by much. Also, if you’re anything like me, it’s worth making sure your phone is insured whichever route you take.

Coming up tomorrow: the saga of Harry’s phone switch, aka: “Mobile phone companies are crap“.