Many people view mobile phone insurance like the extended warranties that unscrupulous eletrical suppliers always try to push onto you. However I have seen enough mobile phones broken or stolen to feel somewhat differently about mobile phone insurance. After all, this is a valuable device (often worth several hundred pounds) that we cart around in our pockets or bags. They go everywhere we go. They get knocked, they get wet, they get dropped and so on. That is a lot of wear and tear on an expensive electrical item.

Also, if you are on a contract, you will be expected to pay your monthly tariff for the contract period whether you have a phone or not and this too can be very frustrating - knowing that you’ll be paying £30 or whatever each month - but with no phone to use on it.

What’s more, mobile phones are usually substantially discounted by retailers. That free phone you got when you signed up probably cost the retailer between £200 and £500 to give you. If you go back for another “free” phone, you’ll likely to expected to pay full market value for it. And that can hurt.

So I personally am a strong believer in mobile phone insurance.

By all means shop around and look for a good deal, but here are four points to consider when it comes to mobile phone insurance…

1) Register The IMEI

Each mobile phone has a unique identification number known as the IMEI and your mobile phone insurance will only cover one handset generally. You therefore need to ensure that you have given your insurer the IMEI number of the handset that you want to cover.

Too many people, for example, are aware that their bank account covers them for mobile phone insurance but have never actually registered the IMEI of their phone making the policy pointless.

2) Turnaround Time?

If your phone is lost or broken, how long will it take to get sorted out? Will it take minutes or will you be waiting for hours to speak to someone about your problem? Get some idea of this before you sign up because there is nothing more annoying than having a phone with a problem, waiting for an hour on a busy Saturday to be seen in the shop and then being told it will take a few *weeks* before your problem will be sorted out. Obviously the shorter the time, the better, particularly if you are a business user.

3) Loan Phone?

If your phone is sent off for repair and analysis (which often happens) do you get to borrow another phone in the mean time to keep in contact? If not, you might as well look for another policy because even one that will sort out out with a new phone isn’t up to much if it takes weeks to arrive. You need a phone (either a new one or a loan) within 24 hours - especially if you are a contract customer and are paying a line rental charge.

4) How Do Replacements Work?

Assuming your phone needs to be replaced because it has been stolen or the damage is too bad to repair, how do replacements work? New phones are constantly being introduced and discontinued so unless you’re very lucky there is a good chance that your original phone won’t be available as a replacement. So how do they decide what phones are available to you, and can you pay a subsidy to upgrade to another model if you don’t like the selection available to you?

These days mobile phones are being packed with more and more gadgets. The cameras keep getting better, some now have GPS on them, music players, radios and so on.

Infact, many people are now choosing phones based on the extra “gadgets” that they get rather than on the phone itself. For example, when the Nokia N95 launched a huge number of people wanted it simply because it would save them buying a GPS system or a new digital camera.

All fair, but there are other factors to consider here too.

Firstly a phone with all these gadgets will eat up a lot more battery life than a phone with fewer features. When it was launched, owners of N95s were saying that the battery was flat in less than a day before new software was released to try and improve this performance.

All these gadgets also make the latest phones bulky devices. Nobody could say the N95 was a small, lightweight, pocket-sized handset.

Also be aware of the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none”. Too many features on a phone can lead to each one being passable but not great.

Finally, be aware that you are still paying for the features whether you know about it or not. It might turn out to be better value to get a cheaper phone and then a dedicated digital camera or GPS devide ontop that would also probably be better at their jobs.

The main point is this - choose a phone first and foremost on the phones’ abilities. Sure, consider looks and gadgets, but think first and foremost about the main use your phone will be getting. Is there really any point in th every latest gadget-laden handset if the battery will be dead in a few hours making it rather unsuitable for it’s main purpose of making and receiving calls.

So you’ve got an expensive mobile phone contract that is costing you over the odds? Whilst the cases are fewer these days, there are occasions where actually having two contracts is actually more cost effective than one.

How so?

Mobile networks are always competing on tariffs and bringing in new price plans to try and lure customers away from their competitors yet you as an existing customer can end up funding these tariff changes through your existing package. It may be, for example, that new customers are getting the same deal you are (or even better!) for £10 a month less. It happens more often than you’d believe.

Of course, nobody tells you about the potential saving until you notice the deal months or even years later by which time you’ve spent hundreds of pounds in additional fees that you needn’t have. Ouch.

Even if you do notice, the networks can get funny about changing you over to a new tariff because of course they are losing out on money every time they do it, so there may be little traps to try and prevent you making the change.

But then we know from previous articles here that mobile networks are driven by new customers.

So you can sometimes become a new customer by taking a new mobile phone number and make a considerable saving in the process.

Let’s take a look at two examples.

Firstly suppose you have 4 months left to run on your £40 a month tariff yet you see you can get the same deal for just £25 a month now. If you tactfully ask the right questions, it may be possible for you to take out  a new contract at the £25 a month deal and then reduce down the old package to a nominal £15 or so. You pay the same £40 a month but you have a brand spanking new phone and in 4 months time you can cancel your old contract altogether leaving you with just £25 a month instead of £40 - a considerable saving.

Even better, some suppliers will offer you cash or bill discounts if you take a new contract but don’t take a phone, so if we suppose you keep your old phone to use on the new contract and get £100 in cash you end up £100 better off for the next four months, then you save £15 a month thereafter - because you actually have two contracts instead of one!

Lets take another example of running your business through a Blackberry that costs you £35 a month. You never bothered with the insurance and now you’ve gone and broken your phone. You’re desperate for a replacement but the thought of coughing up £400 for a new Blackberry doesn’t exactly fill you with joy. Your contract runs out in 6 months and they have a new tariff that would suit you that is £30 a month. If you drop down your old number to the lowest available tariff such as £20 and sign up for the new contract you will pay £30 for the new contract and £20 for the old one. This will go on for the next 6 months and then it will drop down to £30 a month when you cancel your old contract.

Instead of paying £400 for a new Blackberry, you just got one for considerably less. Let’s look at the maths.

You would have spent £400 on a new Blackberry, plus paid your £35 a month for the 6 remaining months of your contract. Total = £610.

With the new deal you actually pay £30 plus £20 per month which is s total of £300.

You just saved yourself over 50% on what you would have spent by just taking out an additional contract. Ingenious, eh?!

The point is this - nothing is ever black and white in the mobile phone industry. You should educate yourself on the market and always be aware of a way you can save some considerable cash.

Firstly I should say that I am not a solicitor and I would strongly encourage you to consult a professional for accurate advice on this topic - the comments here are only my own opinions based on what I have read.

My understand, right or wrong, is as follows:

In order to use a mobile phone legally while driving you must not be holding the phone - so it is advisable to house it in a cradle on your dashboard. It does seem as though you are able to actually dial numbers but once again you must not actually be holding the phone.

Of course, if you cannot hold the phone then you must find a way to communicate with it and devices such as bluetooth headsets and in-car kits are popular for this purpose.

Poor mobile phone signal is both one of the commonest and also one of the most annoying problems experienced by mobile phone owners. Not only does it defeat the whole point of a phone but it also drains your battery faster as your phone constantly searches around for a better signal. On the upside there are a number of things that you can do to improve the situation.

Before you start trying to solve the problem with your phone, start off by checking that there actually is a problem. It might just be that you are in an area that has a poor signal and that infact there is nothing wrong with your phone. To test this, borrow someone elses phone that is on the same network as you to see if you a better signal or not on their handset. If there is a noticable difference it is likely down to your handset rather than the network itself and there are a few things we can try.

Conversely if the problem is the network itself there isn’t a huge amount that you can really do to improve the situation I’m afraid.

Firstly the 3G signal doesn’t tend to be tremendously reliable or strong so I would check whether you have 3G activated on your phone and if so turn it off. The 2G signal is almost without exception a better, stronger and more reliable signal.

Secondly try a manual roam where you essentially take your mobile phone off the network and then put it back on again. It’s the mobile phone equivalent of restarting your computer to improve performance and may well make a marked improvement in the signal you are seeing.

If you’ve tried both of the above points but you’re *still* not having much luck it would be worth looking at upgrading the software on your phone. For some reason mobile phone software seems to really suffer from corruptions and errors and this can be noticed in the form of poor signal on your phone. Upgrading the software either yourself, or by taking it into your local mobile phone retailer, will often markedly improve the signal strength.

As a final ditch attempt, assuming you have tried every other solution mentioned here, you could consider buying one of the budget mobile phone signal boosters that stick to your phone. I have no evidence that these things actually work for for just a few pounds they may be worth a try as it’s a lot cheaper than buying a replacement phone.

The mobile phone market is a very competetive, sales-driven environment and with it comes sales targets for the people who work there.

And while things do seem to be changing slowly, acquisition of new customers and growth of market share are the major factors presently deciding who is successful and who isn’t.

And so it follows that from a management point of view, the more mobile telephone numbers activated in a gaiven period, the more success the network must be, the better the annual report will be and the larger the bonuses that everyone can have.

Which is why you may well be told that certain deals are only available to you if you take a new mobile number. It’s not official and the people at the top would at least pretend to be stunned if you drew it to their attention, but a considerable number of “new” customers are simply existing customers being gently convinced to swap their old number for a new one. This process is known in the industry as “churn”.

The downside of this is that you may find yourself constantly hampered with comments about “If you were willing to take a new number…”. In this case stay strong. Remember this isn’t an official line so don’t be afraid to push the point home that you know what churn is, you know it’s not legitimate and if necessary offer to go elsewhere or complain. Hopefully that will make the sales person back down.

On the other hand, if you’re perfectly happy to change your number then you can really push for a great deal on your contract. You know that sales person really wants your business so feel free to push the envelope and push for a better and better deal. If he or she isn’t hungry enough to give you what you want then try somewhere else, or try a different sales person on a different day. Sooner or later someone will be so desperate for figures they’ll give in - and you’ll get the best value for money you’ve ever had.

So your mobile phone has a music player on it and you want to put some music onto it?

First off you’ll need the music on your computer in a digital format which will mean buying it legitimately off one of the mp3 download sites like Emusic or Musicmatch or ripping tracks from your CD collection.

Secondly you will need to have installed the driver software that came with your mobile phone onto your computer. If you have lost the CD that came with your phone or for some reason it never came with one, check out the manufacturer’s website for another copy of the software to download.

You will then need to connect your mobile phone to the computer so you can transfer files between the two.

Once a connection has been established it’s simply a matter of copying the particular music files from your computer over to your phone.

As an example, watch the video below to see some Samsung mobile phone software in action…

Most the the latest mobile phones are tremendously expensive. The top handsets like the Nokia N95 and the iPhone set retailers back hundreds of pounds to provide but they’re willing to give them away free to encourage you to sign up for a contract with them.

This also means, however, that the contract fee you pay each month actually goes first and foremost on paying that that initial loss that the retailer took.

A £500 phone that was given to you free on a £40 a month tariff means that it will take just over a year before the supplier is back in the black and can look at making a profit from you so if you are willing to go without the latest handset you can often get a far better deal.

If you only need a phone for call and texts and are not too worried about having the coolest handset around it can often be more cost effective to buy a phone outright from a reputable dealer and then to look at sim-only deals.

As they sound, with a sim only deal you are merely getting the sim card as opposed to having a phone as part of the package and so the considerably lower costs to the supplier are passed onto you and you can sometimes find some crazy deals.

For example, at the time of writing, Vodafone are offering 600 minutes and unlimited texts for £20 a month, with a rolling contract of just 30 days (so you can cancel it at any time with just a month’s notice).

On a 12 month contract, 600 minutes would cost you £40 a month and you’d still be limited to 500 texts.

So you’d save over 50% on a monthly basis by doing a sim-only deal. Unfortunately they don’t tend to be marketed very much simply because the mobile phone market is focused around contracts rather than these deals where you can get out at any time but if you’re willing to hunt around you can really land yourself a bargain.

Backing up your phone is like insurance - most people don’t actually consider it until it’s too late.

This is unfortunate.

If you are like most people, your phone is a rich treasure trove of picture, videos, ringtones and all sorts of other things that are important to you - least of all your contacts! Remember that if you lose your phone, it gets stolen or breaks, you may never be able to get all those numbers back and I have known businesses to literally be crippled when, for example, a builder loses his phone and with it 5+ years of clients and suppliers.

Don’t take the chance. I personally recommend backing up your phone at least once a month, possibly even once a week if you are a heavy user so you have all your data saved carefully on your computer should the worst happen.

There are two forms of back up.

Firstly, it is possible to buy sim readers, where you literally pop in your sim card and it saves all your contacts off there. Be aware that it will only save contacts - not pictures, videos etc. and also be aware that contacts can be saved to a sim card or your phone so make sure you haven’t missed any that are on your phone.

The alternative, which to me is the better option, is to connect yout phone to your computer and back up the whole thing using the software that comes with your phone. The whole process will take you a little while to figure out the first time but once you’ve done it you will find it very easy to do in the future.

Fancy the idea of accessing the internet via your laptop from anywhere? Then welcome to the wonderful world of mobile broadband.

Quite simply, you sign up for a “dongle” which acts as a modem that functions via the mobile phone network. You pop this into your laptop, install a piece of software to get everything working and hey-presto - you’re online.

Now you need to be aware that the speed of the internet access can vary massively. In an area of poor quality signal your dongle will be forced to use the GPRS data network which will make your internet connection as slow as (if not slower than) dial-up internet in my experience. However with a decent signal it really can be blazingly fast and when I spent some time working in London last year my mobile broadband connection was so fast I didn’t really miss my fixed line at all.

All the major networks now offer mobile broadband for a cost of around £20 a month depending on the data transfer you need.

And here is the biggest question there is when it comes to mobile broadband - how is it charged? You see, my fixed-line broadband offers unlimited access. My mobile phone charges me by the minute. Both are easy to keep track of. But mobile broadband charges you by something far more difficult to visualize - by data transfer.

Telling you that you can get 3 gigs of data for £15 a month from Vodafone probably doesn’t really mean much to you, and I wouldn’t blame you for a second so let me make two points to try and help.

Firstly the software that runs your dongle will normally have a “meter” on it so you can monitor how much data you use and in doing so you shouldn’t have any nasty surprises at the end of the month.

Secondly, I work mainly on the Internet. Sometimes I can be connected for 8 hours or more. And in my highest month of use (when I was using my mobile broadband daily while I waited for my fixed line broadband to be installed in a new house) I only just topped 1 gig of data.

So that means if you are using it responsibly and just visiting average websites with images and text on, it will be virtually impossible to go over the limit.

Be aware, however, that I have heard of people clocking up £500+ bills in a month because they didn’t pay attention to their useage and were either downloading vast numbers of videos or mp3s (which use up considerably more data than a basic web page) or had viruses present on their computer which were leading to vast amounts of data moving “behind the scenes”.

In short, if you are an average user who will just be checking emails, visiting Ebay and other average sites you shouldn’t have a thing to worry about.