Carphone Warehouse in customer data breach
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
That's my parents and my remaining grandparent's details breached then. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Still, in some cases, a contract doesn't offer bad value. My Mum ordered an iPhone 6 this week, on contract. £90 up front, then £25 for 24 months, so £690 in total over the 2 years. To buy the phone outright from Apple would be £539, leaving £151 over the 24 months (£6.29/m) for a sim-only plan, which wouldn't have offered as much data/minutes/texts as the contract did.
However, if you're buying an iPhone straight after launch, there's a much stronger case for outright purchase, as the contracts are initially much less competitive.
The Lumia 435 is not a fantastic handset for techies, it's unsuitable for myself as anything other than an emergency backup or satnav. Largely because the far fewer apps it does have, are not as good as the Android or iOS equivalents.
It's a hell of a bargain for £15 though. It's frankly still reasonable at £35.
However for my mum, it's a perfect "my first smartphone". Not least because the hideous safety orange colour scheme makes it harder to lose.
I purchased my own handset from P4U, SIM free, and it's on a PAYG network. It was cheaper than buying it on Amazon, and I could pick it up instantly.
Amazon deliveries are really hit and miss here at the moment. Months of free Prime because they've repeatedly fucked up time-sensitive deliveries.
Amazon only fucked up one delivery for me in the last 10 years. They left a 512Gb SSD on my doorstep and it got nicked. They sent out a new one instantly.
TBH you can nail a Moto G for not much now. My wife uses one. I can't stand the lag on android though after using WP. And iOS just isn't very flexible. I mean I can't download an mp3 from something without buggering around with itunes.
It's suffered more abuse than any piece of hardware reasonably should, and it's starting to show it. Battery needs replacing, and I think the front speaker assembly does too. But I've more than had my money's worth.
I couldn't go to WinPho because of apps: No Tasker, no Firefox+uBlock, no FolderSync, no working Netflix. (Might take three reboots before it'll play a video on the 435. Even then there'll be a green line down the screen. Netflix know, it's an MS bug, MS don't care. Months later, still no patch.) Dropbox won't background sync. No Chromecast.
And I couldn't go back to an iPhone. You're right, the "my way or the highway" of Apple just doesn't work for me.
I vastly prefer CoPilot to HERE. Although when my dad needed a satnav, I just got him to buy a Lumia 435 instead. He loved it.
Your £15 4GB 4G bag doesn't start until next month though, does it? But yeah, the effectively free upgrade to 4G data is another reason for me to say goodnight to my faithful Moto. I'll probably be getting a Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 and unlocking it soon.