Shoes and mobile phones

[strange_complex]

To celebrate having a free day on Saturday, I first enjoyed a big fat lie-in, then took a leisurely breakfast, watched some TV, noodled on the 'net, and finally headed into town to complete a few shopping missions I hadn't had time to attend to for the past week or so. I needed to stock up on things like shampoo and so on from Boots, but it had also become urgent that I buy a new pair of actual boots. So urgent, in fact, that I'd got to the point of being faced each morning with the choice of wearing either a) a pair of boots with one missing sole, a broken shank¹ and a rapidly disintegrating interior or b) a pair of boots with the bottom of one heel missing. Usually, pair b) won out - but it was clear that this state of affairs could not go on.

I wasn't really looking forward to the boot shopping very much, as I have terrible trouble finding boots I like which are appropriate for work. I've railed in this journal before about those stupid heels which are placed right at the back of the boots, I don't like wedges, and I don't want to wear anything more than about 2.5 inches high for the sake of comfort. So there's not much on the contemporary high street which I really want to wear.

However, yesterday the Shoe Gods were clearly with me, as I walked into Clarks, saw a pair of boots I liked straight away, tried them on and found that they fitted beautifully. I can't find a picture of them online that I can link to, but they're Victorian-looking black leather ankle-boots, with cosmetic laces up the front, a practical zip up the side and a nice-looking heel about 2" high. Plus, they were in the sale. Yay!

Thanks to Clarks, I'd got everything done I needed to do within an hour of leaving the house, so I used the time I'd expected to spend trudging gloomily around boot-shops checking out mobile phone deals instead, with an eye to the upcoming end of my current contract with Vodafone on 27th February. This is what I found, in the sort of price-range I'm willing to pay and with the sort of features I want:

Network	Vodafone	O2	3	T-mobile	Orange
Plan	150 Anytime	Online 25	X-Series Silver	Flext	Dolphin
Monthly charge	£25	£25	£22.50 for 8 months, then £40	£27.50	£35
Insurance	£6.95	£7.50	£5.99	£5.99	£6
Minutes	150	200	300	c. 85	250
Texts	500	500	1000	c. 170	250
Internet allowance	Really unclear	1Mb then £3 per Mb	1Gb	1Gb	£1 per Mb
Handset	Sony V630i	Any	Nokia N73	Nokia 6253	Most
Contract	18 months	18 months	18 months	18 months	12 months

Given that I'm currently paying £30 per month for a mere 25 minutes, 250 texts and no internet allowance, those all look pretty tempting. In fact, I think I'm most tempted by the T-mobile Flext deal. Although the numbers of minutes and texts are a bit lower on that deal than some of the others, you can actually use up an overall 'allowance' on whichever you like, which is rather nice, and I very much doubt on current usage levels that I'd feel restricted by it. And that lovely, ripe 1Gb of internet usage is very tempting! Although my current phone can theoretically access the internet, I never use it, because I have no idea how much it will cost me, and suspect it might be rather a lot. A 1Gb allowance basically means being free to surf as much as I like, in practical terms, and the web browser the guy in the shop showed me looked pretty decent, too. Although I probably won't make as much use of it now as I might have done a year ago (when I was spending at least nine hours on trains a week), I can still see how it could be really handy for things like house moves (which I know needs to happen again fairly soon), trips away and so on.

If anyone has any thoughts on that deal, or any of the others, or any general experiences with any companies other than Vodafone (the only company I've ever used so far) which you think I should know about, speak up!
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1. The steel 'backbone' of most heeled boots. You know it's broken when the heel no longer stays solid in relation to the boot, will move about if pushed by a hand and feels like it's slipping out behind you when you walk.

Comments

[nigelmouse.livejournal.com]

Thats true. However, there's a gotcha worth remembering. Opera Mini uses Opera's servers in america as a proxy. This means that all the data you send/recieve goes via thier servers. Thier servers do clever stuff like reformatting the web pages and resizing the images so that the pages load nice and fast to your handset, but this does mean that all the data goes via your internet allowance.

This is worth knowing for things like Vodafone live. Vodafone live is Voda's own portal area which (if I remember correctly) doesn't count towards your internet usage, it's free. I doubt you could access this 'live' area via OperaMini, only using the phones built in browser. If you could access the live area via OperaMini then it would probably start costing you via your internet usage.

This really isn't that important though, as OperaMini doesn't replace the phones existing browser, it is just an additional option. So there would be nothing stopping you using OperaMini for checking LJ and the phones built in browser for that networks services like Vodafone live.

I feel like I'mjust rambling about geek stuff now so I'll shut up :)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Vodafone live is free??? Christ, for the past two years (since I got a phone which could access it) I've been scrambling desperately to get off Vodafone live pages every time I accidentally pressed something which took me onto them, in the belief that it was costing me bucket-loads of money! This is actually my biggest complaint about internet accessibility from phones, and perhaps particularly the way Vodafone handles it - complete obscurity about what it might cost = I don't use it at all, so it might as well not be there. It's why the Flext deal is so tempting - and of course also why fixed-rate internet charges quickly eclipsed pay-by-the-minute rates for home PC usage.

[nigelmouse.livejournal.com]

i *think* vodafone live is free, but I'm no expert on thier exact rules so don't quote me on that. As it's something I've never used I don't know how clear it is when you start using the real web and start getting charged for usage.

Your comment/concerns are pretty much exactly whats stopping most people using data services. Most operators have never made it clear what costs money and how much things like data will cost you. Quite often thier own web sites are terrible in explaining these kinds of details as well.

In the states quite a few operators have have fixed cost (almost) unlimited data plans for thier mobile networks, very much like broadband is priced in the uk at the moment. I think UK operators have been scared to implement such tarrifs as they think it'll cut into thier current profits from data charges (and are probably right).

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

It looks like we will be going that way over here, too. The deals that both 3 and T-mobile are offering, with 1Gb usage included in the cost, basically are unlimited for most people's practical purposes. At the moment, that means they'll be getting custom other networks aren't, because people are attracted by those offers (e.g. me!). That makes it worth doing for them at present, even if they are losing profits in the specific area of data usage. Of course, eventually they'll all jump on the bandwagon, so things will even out again. But I presume the short-term competitiveness it brings in for the companies who offer it first is making it worthwhile for them.