Howdy,

I thought id let you all know about an offer i found at the local Orange store today. The previous best id heard was £35 a month which is not too shabby but it does get better!

Orange currently have a credit option for any old phone. And by any, the guy in the shop told me the phone literally needs to turn on, in other words, any phone will do (i plan to give them an age old Ericsson T310 ).

Anyhow the upshot is that it gives you £100 off the phone (though the catalogue im looking at suggests £150) which, on a £40 a month contract (for 18 months) changes the price paid to £34.45. They will do it on the £35 a month contract, reducing it to £29.45, though the phone will cost £39.99. I will ask them if they can rejiggle it so i get the phone for free and instead pay £32 or something, but i wont hold my breath!

Hope it helps

Mods, i guess you can delete this post as, having had a browse around, it appears that people already know about the phone trade option through orange!

Unless, that is, you think it may be of use to keep it up here?!?

You can haggle on the buyback - the deal I got was:

Phone: £39.99
Contract: Dolphin 35 (600 mins, unlimited texts, unlimited data)
Buyback: £180 on ANY old phone (phone only, no chargers or manuals - I gave them an old samsung d500 I had lying around).
= £25 a month

But how much do you pay for data?

I would like to point out you CANT haggle with buyback its company set guideline and if you got anything differant, the shop you dealt with are breaking our rules.

Well, admittedly it says £150 buyback in the brochure, so i dont know where they got £100 from.

BTW, all this stuff about data, is it really necessary? The phone has wifi, i have tom tom 7 (or at least, my dad does!) and a seperate GPS thingy, do i really need data transfer? Im assuming thats for those situations when you cant find a wireless network but given that i live in birmingham that really isnt a problem?

Or is there something else its used for?

You need a £40pm tariff for any free data these days don't you?

Even then it's only 250mb fup. I think we all wish Orange would get serious about data...

Orange shops and buybacks... That rings alarm bells for me! lol

They used to just get sent to a company called "Shields" in a grey sealed box. It really didn't matter what condition the phone was....

You need to speak to your shops then

I got offered £100 at Basildon, then £120, then £150, then £180 in Chelmsford.

Regarding the data, I'm on the 500mb fup "unlimited" (I made the store manager write that it's 500mb on my contract ) bundle which was offered for customers who signed up before the 1st Aug.

I believe Blackhorse works for Orange so should know!

Not a bad deal then StarMonkey!

@LessThanSte - If you have access to secure Wireless connections all the time then you probably don't need data. I don't and like the freedom unlimited data gives me without the hassle of WiFi.

I'm sure Blackhorse does know what the policy is - but as SpaceMonkey found out, it looks like the shops aren't sticking to company policy!

I've just been away to york for the weekend - found 3g to be extremely usefull, even GPRS wasn't too bad, was getting 22kps sat in my hotel room.

Best bit - walking around york trying to find 'lush' (for the girlfriend -honest!) quick look on the website, found the address. Whipped out google maps and used gps to navigate to it

Also used it hooked up to a laptop - hard to tell the difference between hsdpa and fixed line broadband when just browsing webpages.