David Carrington

I’ve always been a big fan of smartphones, especially from HTC. I currently own an HTC BlueAngel, Touch, Diamond, Dream (G1), and now I’ve ordered an HTC Desire to match.

This morning I posted to Twitter:

T-Mobile want to charge me £170 to upgrade to an HTC Desire. Yet another reason I’ll probably switch to Vodafone next month.

£170 for the upgrade, on a contract that was already costing me about £30 every month? No thank you very much.

People can say what they like about Twitter but it’s great when I start getting responses like these, it makes it a great place for me:

gavinlew: speak to @vodafoneukdeals for a good deal on a htc desire – there is a nice guy called Ben who is helping me out

artesea: if you want I can get you 30% the line rental on any (standard) tariff. Makes £35 a month only £24.50

VodafoneUKdeals: We can do the Desire FREE on 18 month 300mins unlimited sms and data for £30 all in [and] artesea’s staff discount would still be available on the £30 offer saving you even more! :-) ^BH

After a quick chat with Vodafone’s Web Relation team, they knocked that £30 monthly contract down to £25 and signed me up. With any luck, artesea (Ryan Cullen) will still be OK giving me that 30% staff discount too.

Here’s a random graph I thought I’d put together just for the fun of it:

Hooray for the interweb!

Since I changed my contract to Orange and got a nice new HTC Touch, Vodafone have been pestering my with calls trying to offer me a better deal. They haven’t grasped that my requirements in my contract have completely changed.

For 3 years or more I was on a minimal Vodafone contract (Singlepoint actually, acquired by Vodafone back in 2003). We’re talking £12/month in the basic contract (750 off peak same network minutes and 50 texts) with bills sometimes going up to about £20. Not very much expenditures at all!

My new Orange contract is a completely different saucepan of penguins: £31.50/month for 500 cross network anytime minutes and unlimited texts. Since they bundled in the headphones and £100 cashback, their offer is far better than anything Vodafone offered me. I even went into the store and they admitted that they don’t have the phone I want or anything close to my needs.

But now my old mobile – hurrah! a Nokia 6310i – gets called every day from Vodafone’s Retention team (08080000133) trying to offer me stupid little deals, such as reducing my current contract to £10/month. This is not what I want at all. I’d gladly pay Orange the extra line rental – I’m using it heavily and I’m going to push the limits of their “unlimited” (aka 3000) monthly texts.

To Vodafone: I spoke to 5 people in various teams before deciding to end my contract, you simply can not convince me at this point to continue with you. You don’t give me what I want.

To Orange: Thanks!!

UPDATE: Vodafone also seem to be using this number (08080000133) for other purposes. I registered my interest in pre-ordering an iPhone from Vodafone at the end of 2009 and they’re now chasing those that showed an interest.