Consumers seduced by Apple’s iPhone have been warned they could save hundreds of pounds by downloading music to a traditional mobile instead.

Details of the iPhone, which combines an iPod with a phone, were announced in Britain last week, but consumers could save more than £500 by opting for another high-end mobile device and downloading music from rival operators, according to analysis by Uswitch, the comparison website.

The iPhone, which goes on sale in Britain in November, can only be obtained here through O2 and comes in three packages, costing £35, £45 or £55 a month. The minimum contract length is 18 months.

The low-end package offers 200 minutes of free calls, 200 texts and unlimited mobile data downloads, subject to a fair-use policy. The medium package has the same internet usage, but 600 minutes of free calls and 500 texts. The most expensive deal has 1,200 minutes and 500 texts.

The handset costs £269, so the minimum you can pay is £899 over the course of the contract.

However, one of the main appeals of the iPhone is its ability to store 8GB of tracks (about 2,000 songs) from the iTunes site, which charges 79p a track.

Taking the average download of 30 songs a month, the minimum cost with the iPhone would be £1,326 for 18 months. With the high-end package, the cost would be £1,686.

Rival operators have been scrambling to highlight their own music services to take the shine off the iPhone in time for Christmas.

Vodafone has just announced its MusicStation service, allowing customers with appropriate handsets to download an unlimited amount of music for £1.99 a week. However, you lose all your music when you stop subscribing, although you get it back if you sign up again. Vodafone’s 18-month deal for £37.50 a month offers 100 more free minutes than iPhone’s low-end package, and 300 more texts. An N95 handset, one of the most feature-rich devices in the market, is also thrown in.

However, Vodafone’s internet service has a 120Mb limit - about 24 songs’ worth, although MusicStation downloads do not eat into this limit.

Without music downloads, the overall cost of the package would be £288 cheaper than the iPhone deal. With music downloads, the cost would be £537 less than iPhone.

Chris Frost of Uswitch said: “The relatively small amount of texts and minutes make the current iPhone offer an expensive proposition.’’ MusicStation will not be available until November. If you would rather keep the tracks you download, a good alternative to iPhone is the T-Mobile Music Jukebox, which offers a selection of 500,000 tracks at £1 each.

The 18-month Web ‘n’ Walk Max deal costs £32.50 on the Flext-35 tariff and offers 450 free minutes of calls a month and 900 free texts – more than twice the number of calls and more than four times the texts with iPhone’s cheapest deal. It also comes with a free Nokia N95 and a comparable internet service offering unlimited downloads subject to a fair-use policy.

After factoring in the cost of the music downloads and the initial set-up fee of £25.98, your total bill would be £1,151 – £175 cheaper than O2’s iPhone.

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