Britain has become a nation of mobile-phone junkies. There are said to be 62.5m mobile phones in this country, which is pretty astounding when you consider there are only 60m men, women and children to make the calls. Fully 85% of the adult population of Britain own a mobile, while four out of five children own a phone by the time they are 11. Yet the UK comes only sixth in an EU league table of phones per capita — lower than Greece or Portugal — says Jupiter Research, while Italy tops the list.
We’ve been hooked on mobiles by an aggressive industry that chases new customers with unrelenting vigour. The huge discounts on the latest handsets offered to those prepared to sign an annual contract encourage them to upgrade a phone even when they don’t need to, while the increasingly popular pay-as-you-go phones can be picked up at supermarkets for £30. The handset market has diversified so much that many people decide to use a different handset depending on the time of day: a feature-packed smart phone at work and a fashionable, slimline number for social evenings and weekends. Nowadays, the question is not “Do you have a mobile phone?”, but “How many mobile phones do you have?” If you are Ajay Champaneri, 32, from Kenton in northwest London, the answer to that question is a staggering six. He is an IT specialist who has taken advantage of the ludicrously cheap offers available from his local mobile-phone retailer to amass enough handsets to kit out his family.
He boasts of his latest acquisition: “I’ve just signed up with 3, and got two handsets and 1,000 free talktime minutes a month, all for 99p per month. I can make more calls than I’ll ever need.”
Amazingly, that’s not the best bargain he has struck. “I’ve signed a few deals that cost absolutely nothing. There are shops offering a cashback incentive, where you buy one phone and line rental and they’ll give you another free. You pay your monthly line rental to 3, then, after your fourth or fifth monthly bill (to prove you are still a customer), the shop puts a year’s line rental back into your account. I’ve had £780 put into my bank account just this week,” Champaneri claims.
The shop can afford to offer such generous terms because the phone networks (such as the 3G network 3) pay retailers handsomely for signing up “new customers”. We win, the shop wins and the desperate network looks as if it is recruiting millions of new customers, each new line being counted as a custo-mer, even though one person may own several. It’s unsurprising, perhaps, that 3 reported a loss close to £1.5 billion while acquiring 2m new subscribers in 2004. The company claims that its retailer commissions are “in line with the industry average”, and that it’s the retailers’ choice if they decide to roll cashback offers into their phone deals.
Sometimes it’s better to strike a deal direct with your phone network than to go through a high-street shop. To the networks, the sound of a customer cancelling a line after their contract has expired is like scraping nails down a blackboard, and threatening to move to a rival is a good way to earn a discount on the latest handset. I once negotiated £100 off a Sony Ericsson phone by calling T-Mobile directly and intimating that I’d take my custom elsewhere.
“There are seven million people in the UK who could get an upgrade on their phone and have never exercised that right,” says Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the leading mobile-phone retailer Carphone Warehouse. Why ever not? Most likely, they didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered.
Incredible cost savings aren’t the only reason people opt for more than one handset. Fashion has become a huge driver, as phones have moved from functional goods to status symbols. Champaneri says: “I’m not one of those people who sees a new handset and thinks ‘I have to have that’, but some of my friends always make sure they have the latest handset.”
Harrison concurs. “Phones have become what trainers were 10 years ago. People are so driven by the fashion of phones, it’s an impulse. Some take out another annual contract just so they can have the latest phone.”
He says that such buyers are predominantly males aged 16-25. There is also evidence that young black and Asian men in particular regard mobiles as status symbols: phone ownership among those two ethnic groups is significantly higher than among white males, the Ipsos Ethnic Minority Study reports.
“The Asian and Afro-Caribbean groups are fashion-conscious and passionate about their phones,” Harrison says, though it is not only men who crave the latest must-have handset. “When the pink Motorola Razr was launched, we saw an amazing surge of women who said, ‘I have to have that now.’”
So what happens to all the old phones discarded by upgrade-hungry fashionistas? Every hour, 1,712 mobile phones are upgraded in the UK alone, the Science Museum maintains. It is currently running an exhibition called Dead Ringers, which exposes the waste represented by discarded handsets. The average mobile phone has a working life of 18 months, despite being built to last far longer.
Fifteen million disused handsets end up polluting the environment in land- fill or gathering dust in cupboards and drawers, the Science Museum says. Many people trade in their phone when buying a new handset, or send it to a recycling scheme, such as those run by Carphone Warehouse (www.carphonewarehouse.com) or Oxfam (www.recyclingappeal.com/oxfam). There is also a healthy second-hand market for handsets on websites such as eBay (www.ebay.co.uk) and Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk).
For many people, having more than one phone is a matter not of choice, but of necessity. “I wouldn’t like people who are my clients to call me on my personal phone,” says Dr Claire Patrick, 32, a smoking-cessation adviser for the NHS in Hampshire. “For security reasons, the NHS decided not to have people taking calls from patients on their own phone.” She jokes: “When they’re calling me on my work phone, I know to put on my ‘work voice’.”
Businesses, too, routinely foist a mobile phone on employees to make sure they are never more than a call away from the office, and many are not entirely happy about that.
“I have to carry two phones around with me — one personal and one for business — and, because I’m on a 24-hour helpline team, I have to carry them both around with me all the time,” says Sarah Low, 23, a research assistant for the Institute of Child Health. “It’s a real pain.”
Her ideal scenario would be to have the two phone lines on a single handset. “It would be fantastic if I could put two Sim cards (the chips that identify each phone number) into one phone and switch between the two. Especially if I could set up two ring tones, one for business and one for personal calls.”
Carrying two handsets has long been a widespread source of irritation, so why can’t the manufacturers oblige with phones that can take two Sim cards? There are multi-Sim adaptors, but they allow only one Sim at a time to be live, which isn’t much use if, like Sarah, you’re permanently on call. Nokia agrees that two-Sim phones are feasible but says: “It’s perceived as a bit technical. Two Sim cards in one phone invite confusion.” More confusion than making sure you have two handsets with you, often with different chargers and hands-free kits for the car? Pull the other one.
There is one group, however, for whom two handsets are an absolute must: philanderers. “I know people who have one phone for their wife or husband to call, and another for contacting their boyfriend or girlfriend,” Champaneri admits. John Prescott’s affair with his secretary was reportedly rumbled when her boyfriend discovered telltale text messages on her mobile — hardly surprising, given that a survey published by Italian private investigators discovered mobile-phone activity is what betrays 90% of affairs. Next time, Mr Prescott, take the tip and supply Ms Temple’s successor with a discreet second mobile that she can turn off within earshot of her boyfriend.
For multiphone compulsives, networks such as Vodafone and Orange offer the same phone number for different handsets. With Vodafone’s MultiSim, for instance, you nominate the handset on which you wish to receive calls, which undeniably saves hassle.
So, do the multi-mobile professionals have the edge on the rest of us? Does the infamous e-mail enslaver, the BlackBerry, enhance the efficiency of its owner? Not necessarily. Research conducted by the London Institute of Psychiatry has found that the constant distraction of e-mails and texts arriving on your smart phone has a more harmful effect on your performance than cannabis, knocking 10 points off the IQ of a harassed worker.
Edward M Hallowell, another psychiatrist, claims in his book Crazybusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap that the information overload from devices such as the BlackBerry has become so bad that people conjure up irrational fears that they have early signs of Alzheimer’s disease because they cannot remember all the data being thrown at them. And they call these things smart phones.
Phones for work, rest and play
WORK — ORANGE SPV M5000
With a full Qwerty keyboard and a decent screen, the M5000 is designed for working on the move. More of a palmtop computer than a phone, it has 3G and WiFi reception, with a plethora of powerful — if quirky — software, so it is suited to travelling execs. But, as our multi-mobile man, Ajay, warns: “It’s not one to fit in your pocket.”
Price £300 with contract from shop.orange.co.uk.
REST — SONY ERICSSON W810i
The multimedia W810i is ideal for a relaxing weekend away. Sound quality from the Walkman music player is superb, and a bundled 512MB Memory Stick houses several albums. The 2G web browser is a useful tool for unearthing titbits of info while on the hoof, and the excellent 2Mp camera is perfect for fun snaps at, say, weddings. Did we mention that it also makes phone calls?
Price Free with contract, or £334 from www.onedaymobile.co.uk.
PLAY — MOTOROLA RAZR V3X
“Sexy and feature-packed” is how our fashion-conscious phone-lover, Ajay, describes Motorola’s ever-evolving V3 range. The V3X is a touch chubbier than earlier models, but packs a 3G internet connection and a 2Mp camera. The menu system remains fiddly, and pictures are not so hot, but this super-slim handset will slip neatly into a pocket, or handbag, for a night out.
Price Free with contract, or £267 from www.foneplanet.com.
Beware “twin-Sim adaptors” that take two Sim cards for one phone. Only one Sim is active. Pointless.
