Given that buying a prepay mobile phone is something thousands of people do every day, you would think that after 20 years of selling the things – okay, I concede, it may be a few years less for prepay – the process would by now be pretty seamless. So let me tell you the story of buying a new handset for one of my kids at the weekend. Stick with this, it’s worth it.
We bought it from Carphone Warehouse. It was her second phone, so in an ideal world, we were looking to keep her existing number. It seemed fairly straightforward, but things soon turned cloudy. To explain, when you look at the Pay As You Go phones in Carphone Warehouse – and I am pretty sure Phones4U is the same – they show two prices, as shown in the photo.
One is for a Pay As You Go Upgrade, keeping the same number and credit. In the case of the HTC 8S Windows Phone my daughter was interested in, the price for this option was £119.95. The price for the same phone on a new connection, with a new number and SIM, was £149.95. There was also a third price for a SIM-free version, handset only, of £229.95.
Naturally I was keen on the Upgrade option, but when my daughter’s phone number was entered into Carphone Warehouse’s system, it came back as “not recognised for an upgrade”. At this point, I called Orange to find out why she didn’t qualify for an upgrade, and was told by the agent in the call centre that Orange didn’t understand or recognise the concept of an upgrade for a Pay As You Go phone. If you’re not on a contract, they told me, you can buy a new phone whenever you want. This was in the store on Saturday. I was told the same thing again this morning.
On Saturday, despite the fact that the concept of an upgrade for a Pay As You Go phone did seem a little odd, I was putting the blame on Orange. Surely if every Carphone Warehouse store in the country is advertising this upgrade price for a Pay As You Go phone, the networks must be in sync with it. Now, after two different Orange advisors have given me the same message, I’m not so sure. I have put a call in to Carphone Warehouse’s press office to find out what their upgrade price for a Pay As You Go phone is all about and why at least one of the UK’s big mobile networks has never heard of it. I am waiting for a response.
In the meantime, back in the store on Saturday afternoon, I decided to bite the bullet and take the new phone on a new connection. My daughter doesn’t have as many contacts as you do by the time you get to my age, so a text message to everyone in her Contacts book would be an easy way of telling all her friends to update her contact details with the new number. So we paid £149.95 for a new connection and new number, though in fact, since the minimum first-time top-up is now £20 not £10, the guy who served me gave me £10 off the phone. (It didn’t occur to me to ask if we could have the phone at the more expensive new connection price and keep the same number, but that’s another story.)
The man gave us our new phone with £20 credit and we left the store and went home. My daughter got her new phone set up and went to a party and two hours later texted her mum to say she had had a text from Orange saying she had 87p credit left. This is only a sub-plot to the main story – the man in the shop had not put us on the Dolphin tariff we requested, which comes with a data allowance, so when my daughter went online, as we had told her she could, she burned through the £20 in a matter of minutes. Orange have since promised a full refund so that’s one box ticked.
So when you get a new phone, you want to get your contacts from your old phone into the new one. No problem. I had cunningly copied the contacts on to the SD card in the old phone, which I then inserted into the new phone. This seemed the most sensible option since her old phone has a full-size SIM, the old phone has a Micro SIM, so it’s not possible to insert the old SIM into the new phone and import contacts from the SIM. (In fact, Orange told me this morning, if you get a Micro SIM adapter you can do this by putting the Micro SIM into the old phone, copying the contacts across, then putting the Micro SIM back into the new phone and importing from the SIM Card. But Orange don’t supply such an adapter, though I may find one if I go in an EE store.)
I just called HTC’s customer support number to ask if there is a menu option for importing from an SD Card in the way there is for importing from the SIM card. The agent confirmed that there wasn’t, but gave me two ways of achieving it by uploading the contacts from the old phone to Live.com and there from there to the new phone. 
There are a number of questions raised by this episode:
Why are handset makers like HTC removing the option of letting you import contacts from a Micro SD Card at the same time as making new phones that take a different sized SIM to your old phone, meaning that importing from the SIM card is not an option?
Why, when the majority of new phones are actually bigger than the one you are trading up from, do you need a smaller SIM card anyway?
Why does one of the UK’s major mobile phone networks know nothing about the way that Pay As You Go phones are being sold by one of the UK’s major phone retailers?
If I get answers to any of these questions, I will be sure to update this piece.
David Murphy,
Editor
