[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam General] christopherwoods:
AFAIK both the M3100 and the Vario 2 have the same processor, as well as identical hardware specs. The CPU in the device is a Samsung 2442A ARM-based XScale processor which runs at 400MHz, but is quicker blow-for-blow than the last generation of Intel XScale CPUs - my brand new device certainly feels snappier than my old Alpine, which ran an Intel PXA272 at 520MHz, and this is from just a few hours' usage.)

Let me weigh in here... I was going to go with Orange on their Dolphin 25 12-month contract. Phone would cost £149.99, contract was £25 a month. 75 anytime minutes and 600 texts.

No inclusive GPRS allowance as far as I could tell.

T-Mobile's best offer (for me): Flext 25 (£20 a month after £5 monthly discount, which applies to all the tariffs) plus first three months of Web 'n Walk free if you buy online. Normally, it's £7.50 a month. Phone: £80.

I ordered off the Orange site, for some reason had an issue with the credit check and didn't bother pursuing it further. Cancelled my order before the email came back from them anyway because as soon as I'd hit Order, I went onto some forums and started reading about how good T-Mobile's tariffs are... And I thought, 'hmm... I bet T-Mobile's offering IS better.'

So, I went and looked - and sure as hellfire, their tariffs were WAY better.

As I said, I cancelled my Orange order straight away and went onto the T-Mobile site. I ordered the phone at about 4am, got a call back the next morning saying 'sorry, the phone's out of stock, we won't get any more in until next week.' That was a problem, as my O2 contract runs out on Sunday. Urk. The lady recommended I try going into my local store and seeing if they could match the offer on the tariff, so off I went, into the shop, told the guy I wanted Flext 25 for £20 a month with WnW with the first three months free like on the web site. Handset cost £80.

He said, 'I can't do the first three months of WnW free, but I can bring down the cost of the phone to £65 - so I've lost about £2.50 overall but I got the phone for SIXTY FIVE QUID! as opposed to Orange's demand of £150 (which would've been £250 if I'd gone with the £19 a month tariff instead of the £25!!!), and my tariff - even with the Web 'n Walk - only comes to £27.50 a month, which is £2.50 a month cheaper than the O2 200 tariff I've been on for the past twelve months.

With Flext 25 I get £60 worth of allowance a month to spend however I see fit - whatever I do (text, call, whatever) is just taken out of this monthly credit, so some months I could text LOADS and not make many calls, or some months I could call more and not bother with texting... But I text more than I call anyway.

The 'unlimited' (read: 2gb/month fair usage, but not rigorously enforced unless you're a complete bandwidth leech) Web 'n Walk for £7.50 a month sold it for me - especially when O2 was charging me £2.35 PER MEGABYTE for GPRS traffic. What a ****ing con. (If you'll pardon my French, but it really does annoy me that much!)

So anyway, I got the phone all set up, it's working (well, charging whilst being used ;)) at the moment, and it's great - I even managed to get my SIM blocked within half an hour of turning it on by managing to type in the wrong PIN three times when I was trying to change it! :D Oops. A three minute call to T-Mobile's 150 (customer services) and I had the PUK code straight away, and that was solved. However, I wasn't convinced that HSDPA was enabled on my account, so I rang up... Explained that I'd like HSDPA enabled if it isn't already on my account, and I was shortly put through to a techie who immediately enabled it on my account and it didn't cost me anything at all.

Had a quick chat with him, he said that the upper limit is around 1.6-1.8mbps download speed in areas with good coverage, but a more realistic speed would be 500-600kbps. I just went, 'well that's FINE by me!!' He also informed me (and he sounded like he knew what he was on about) that amongst T-Mobile's plans for the near future is a plan to increase the speed of their Web 'n Walk to a maximum of 7mbps! I did ask him if there was a timeline for HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), but he said 'no, not at the moment.'

Still, that's blazing speeds for a ridiculously good price as it is!

After my past year of misery with O2, I am wholeheartedly recommending T-Mobile if you want a good data package and a great phone at an awesome price point. By my calculations, I would've already run up a bill of at least £35 if I was on my old O2 tariff, just with my GPRS WnW usage, and not even had the phone more than 12 hours!

For £65 for the phone and £27.50 a month, I don't think you can beat that package. The Orange package is £85 more expensive just for the identical handset just in a different colour scheme (why?!) and you get WAY less on the Dolphin 25 than you do with Flext. Sure, if you go with an 18-month Dolphin 25 contract you get 150 anytime minutes as opposed to 75, but bloody hell... T-Mobile are the obvious winners here. I think you can only get a really good deal when it comes to renewing with Orange if you're a long-time customer... At least five years or more.

Go with the T-Mobile deal! I've not regretted my decision in the slightest, and to be honest I wasn't quite mad enough to pay an extra £85 just to have the grey and dark orange colour scheme over the gunmetal and dark reddish colours of the T-Mobile version (there's no pink in sight, apart from the splash screen and a tiny little bit on the phone keypad screen!) Oh, and in the T-Mobile box you get a screen protector and stereo headphones (not the best, but they're certainly alright quality) with an inline mic, so that's kinda cool.