I would like to take a moment to share my experience with my iPhone on the O2 network and a couple of ways that I have managed to save money.

Anyone who wants to own an iPhone must understand the sheer costs involved and even with the cheapest contract deal it will still ultimately end up costing you over £700 for 18 months of usage. Even if you were to buy one without a contract it is currently going for £449 plus the cost of all your calls and messages on top of that.

When I bought mine I chose to buy it from eBay and managed to get it for about £300 for a brand new unused one. From that experience I would highly recommend that if you want one that you should try and get it from a trusted eBay seller too.

Once upon a time O2 was known as BT Cellnet and I was still using one of their sim cards but I needed to buy a 3G sim card to make the iPhone work. I have always managed to keep the same number on the same sim card, but I had no choice but to ditch my ancient BT Cellnet sim card and transfer my number to the new 3G O2 card. It came with a year’s free Web & WiFi Bolt On worth £10 a month. For me, this free service ran out in April and O2 gave me plenty of notice about it but when it came to the day that it would automatically start deducting £10 a month from my credit I only had £5 on my balance and the Bolt On became inactive. The next day I woke up to discover that my remaining credit had diminished. I can only assume that my iPhone was constantly trying to access the internet and that without the free internet Bolt On I was unknowingly paying for it in my sleep! Then I got a message saying that my phone needed at least 17p to access WAP services. I was left with no credit and I wasn’t even trying to use WAP services but every few minutes my message tone rang and I kept receiving the same pestering message. I must have got hundreds of these messages which is great if you want to sound popular to others but this was just an annoyance for me.

I had to take a moment and think about how I was using my iPhone to access the internet during this this first year and I figured that I was mainly using it at home using my broadband connection. There aren’t too many occasions when I really needed to use it elsewhere and when I did it was normally in a free WiFi zone. Therefore why would I need this Web & WiFi Bolt On costing me £10 a month on top of any credit I might need? Sure I might have benefited from it during my year’s free usage but ultimately I was accessing the internet via other sources and rarely through O2. I would imagine that this would be the same for a lot of people yet they might not realise that they are needlessly paying £120 a year for a service that they don’t really use. My advice is that if you are in a similar position you should cancel your Web & WiFi Bolt On now! There is a better solution out there that you can benefit from!

I cancelled my Web & WiFi Bolt On on the Top Up Line (dial 4444). I then swapped my tariff via the internet to Text & Web which for £10 gives you 300 texts a month plus free internet plus you can use the money you topped up with. It is pretty much the same as using the Web & WiFi Bolt On but you actually get to use the £10 it costs as credit and also benefit from free text messages! There is an ever so slight catch and that is the free internet is limited to 500MB a month but to be fair that is a lot of information for your iPhone to download in a month. I have continued to use my phone in the same way as when I had the free Bolt On and I have only used up 5MB in the two weeks since the swap so chances are if you’re like me then you won’t go over 500MB especially if you are using your own Broadband connection to access the internet at home as well.

Unfortunately I have quite bad luck sometimes and the swap over didn’t go very well for me at first. After I cancelled the Bolt On and swapped to the more beneficial Text & Web tariff I waited a couple of days for the changes to be made. I had no contact with anyone on my phone for nearly a week and when I needed to send a text message I used O2′s “Lend Us A Quid” service so that I could send just one message but within minutes my phone had once again eaten up all that credit too without me even accessing anything that I would need credit for. This was very frustrating but it is just my luck! The only other way I could get in touch with people was via social networking sites but Facebook is no substitute for mobile communications! I waited as long as I could and then decided it was finally time to Top Up. I wasn’t particularly foolish about it, I mean I checked to see whether the Bolt On had really been cancelled and to see if the new tariff had been activated because I was worried about something going wrong and wasting any more money. The Top Up line said that I didn’t have a Bolt On so I took that as a green light. I topped up by £15 as you benefit from 500 free text messages and it all seemed fine. I sceptically checked my balance moments later and was shockingly left with only £4! Okay so I had to repay the pound I borrowed earlier in the week but it seemed like I had also been charged for the Bolt On which I had confirmed as being cancelled. It was outrageous! I went to the O2 shop the next day to try and fully explain the situation. A kind and understanding lady took some details and made a call to check what had happened. Apparently the Bolt On hadn’t been cancelled as far as O2 were concerned so obviously I had been charged for it which is very sneaky of them. The person at the other end of the line then managed to cancel it for good this time and after some debate also managed to refund me the £10 I had paid for it which I appreciated for the inconvenience. They warned me about how it costs £3 per MB of data but I told them that I had swapped to the Text & Web tariff and they further warned me about how it was limited to 500MB a month. I said that I was confident that I wouldn’t require that much and that if I did somehow need more than 500MB a month that I would be back and put the Bolt On back on. The warnings did make it seem like a bit of a gamble but I really think it has paid off and O2 obviously just expect people to pay for that service without thinking about whether they even need it or without considering whether there is another option out there.

Summary: My tips for saving money with an iPhone on O2:

• Buy an iPhone on eBay. It will be cheaper than a contract (£700+) or a brand new handset from the shop (£449).
• Take advantage of Sim Cards that include a year’s free Web & WiFi Bolt On but cancel it at the end of the year.
• If you are paying for Web & WiFi Bolt On consider if you are really fully benefiting from using the service, if not then cancel it and stop wasting money on a service you don’t use!
  • But if you do cancel the Web & WiFi Bolt On you need to be aware that it costs £3 per MB but I would also recommend that you swap to the Text & Web tariff to benefit from keeping the money you Top Up with as credit plus the free internet that your iPhone desires plus the added bonus of hundreds of free text messages.

I have wrote this post because I believe more people could be benefiting and saving money too if they know these little tips but I have only found this out from my own experience with my iPhone, it is very unlikely that you will not hear this advice from someone at O2. In these difficult financial times I believe it is important to try and save as much money as possible and stop needlessly paying out for services you don’t require. Of course some people might say that you don’t “require” an iPhone because what did people do before Apple invented the iPhone? But I really feel like I have benefited from having an iPhone in my life, yet I don’t think I would be able to say the same for the iPad which just seems like a laughably oversized iPhone; what exactly is the point in it? I don’t understand it.

If you know of other ways to save money with an iPhone on O2 feel free to use the comments box below.