BillMonitor

The BillMonitor team has always felt that personalization is of huge value on the mobile channel- as there is just less space for the user to browse and discover. So we really liked Handmark’s new platform Pocket Express being fully customizable (we just hate to waste time when checking the snowfall and our stock portfolio on the way to Gstaad for a week’s skiing) . Better still there is the easy ability to share this information (via direct download link)- so we can gloat over the latest Oxford United triumph (ahem) at the press of a button.

Best of all, if our limo happens to break down on the way to the slopes, Pocket Express’s very own Jeeves, the “MobileCierge” service can rush to the rescue. Mr MobileCierge delegates his work to a team of round the clock personal assistants who can apparently answer almost any request, anywhere in the world, whether it is personal, travel, medical or emergency-related. We are very interested to hear the feedback from this part of the service – or what about an anonymous live stream of user requests Handmark? Alas we fear MobileCierge, like his colleague Jeeves, might just be too discreet for those kind of revelations…

Our favourite source for mobile news, Mobile Industry Review, is due to become subscription only on 27th March. This is great news for them, but for everyone in the mobile industry who relied on them for news and reviews, it’s time to branch out and find some new sources. Here’s some of our favourites.

Bloggers provide a more personal insight into the industry which can be invaluable, and often, a lot more interesting than the news sites! We follow Jonathan Jensen, James Whatley, and Ben Smith, all of whom have written for MIR and are well worth a read. MJelly also presented a column on MIR and continues to provide news about the latest mobile services entering the market.

Carnival of the Mobilists is an incredibly interesting news source. Each week it is hosted by a different mobile blogger and aims to digest the weekly news and pick out the best stories. It travels all over the place but you can always keep track of it on the carnival homepage!

We’ve recently subscribed to The Fone Cast after MIR posted a link and we’ve found it to be an invaluable resource, providing a podcast full of all the mobile news worth hearing about as well as a quality news blog. MocoNews is another fantastic source for industry headlines. For mobile reviews, we keep an eye on Mobile Phones UK and Top Mobile Phone Reviews.

If you’re interested in a particular brand of phone or network, chances are there’s a blog to suit you. We watch All About iPhone and The Nokia Blog, for example, as well as TMoNews for all the T-Mobile news.

Finally, something exciting and shrouded in mystery. Rumour has it that The Really Mobile Project (Now on Twitter!) is going to be the next project from some of the old MIR people. At the time of writing, very little is known about exactly what it’s going to be, but it’s sure to be well worth a look if you’ve got an interest in mobile.

Oh, and, of course, don’t forget to compare your tariff on BillMonitor to make sure you’re getting the best value for your money.

Have we missed any? Let us know your favourites!

Today we managed to hit a major milestone in our efforts to improve our mobile bill tracking feature. Thanks to Ben’s efforts the engine is now so fast that once the crawlers have successfully retrieved a bill we can process it in real-time on the site.

So, what does this mean?

Real mobile bills are now treated in exactly the same way as the statistically generated bills we use for our tariff calculator. You can now filter by handset, contract length, and operator as much as you like – the engine will always return a recommendation based on our very latest plans.

Unfortunately the drawback to this is that all our old stored recommendations are no longer available. If you have submitted a recommendation recently you will have to resubmit it. Your new recommendation will be valid forever, and will automatically update as we get new plans. That means that if you bookmark it you can come back at any time to see if there are any new deals that would work better for your usage.

Phew.

The world of contract mobile broadband is, mercifully, a little simpler than the pay as you go options. Every major network will give you a USB modem for free and a monthly allowance in gigabytes, and away you go. Beware, however, because there are a few gotchas to this whole thing: first, those free laptops aren’t always as free as they appear. If you’re going to be going for a £30 plan anyway, then yes, you might benefit, but don’t forget to check out the price of buying the laptop separately before you dive in, because often you’ll find yourself paying a hell of a lot more than you would if you’d just ordered it online and gone for a dongle instead. For this reason I’m not going to consider laptops, because here we’re all about saving money! Second, unlike phone tariffs, you often don’t gain a lot by taking a longer contract, so always consider taking a shorter contract if you’re not going to lose out on it. No-one likes being tied in!

Let’s start with Vodafone. £15 per month of your hard-earned cash gets you 3 gigabytes of data, and taking a 24 month contract will get you £5 off for the first 3 months. 5 gigabytes will set you back £25. If your heart is set on a ‘free’ laptop, you’ll pay £25 a month for 1 gigabyte of usage.

T-Mobile’s prices are almost identical: £15 for 3 gigabytes of usage, and 5gb for £30. It’s worth noting thst T-Mobile use a “fair usage” policy instead of an allowance, so if you go over it, you might find your net access locked down but you won’t get charged any extra. Again, there’s a laptop on offer.

O2 provide a reduced-VAT £14.69 price for 3 gigabytes, with 4 months of cheaper rental thrown in for the 24 month users. A huge 10 gigabyte allowance will cost you £30 – oh, wait, sorry, £29.38.

Orange offers a 1 gigabyte plan for low usage customers, but if you don’t buy online they’ll be a bit tight and charge you for the USB modem. It’s £9.79 a month for that, or £14.68 for 3 gigabytes. They also do a great value 10 gigabyte plan at £24.47 a month.

Three weigh in with a cheap cheap 1 gig for £10 plan, throwing in a free modem for anyone on an 18 or 24 month plan. If you want to go for 12 months it’ll cost you £48.93 to get set up. 3 gigabytes will cost you £15 a month for 12 months, and for the same price, you’ll get 5 gigabytes if you go for an 18 or 24 month contract. 7 gigabytes will set you back £25, and 15 gigabytes, the biggest plan on offer, will cost you £30.

That wraps up the choices on offer. Click through to the network sites if you want more information, or drop us an email and we’ll see if we can help.

If you do decide to go for that netbook, you may want to consider building it into a robot that can bring you popcorn.

Eagle-eyed BillMonitor fans will have spotted us on the back page of the Cash section in this weekend’s Observer (And the Guardian blog). Our first venture into the national press saw a whole heap of new friends visiting our lovely website, so hello to all of you! Keep up to date with our goings on here and on Twitter if you like, or drop us an email and let us know what you think!

Flora Graham of Crave wrote a lovely article about BillMonitor and we think it explains it all better than we ever could ourselves. Thanks a lot, CNet!

We always suspected it takes a PhD in mathematics to understand mobile phone contracts. Now Oxford boffins have proven it takes three of them.

You’re too kind, Flora!

BillMonitor doesn’t support mobile broadband services yet, but they’re becoming very popular, so when a friend of mine asked me which was the best deal out there I thought I’d do my service to mankind and post a run-down of the pay as you go broadband services around.

Vodafone kick us off with a good deal if you’re looking for short term use: £39 for the USB modem, including one gigabyte of data. As soon as you want to use more than that, however, it gets pretty expensive, at £15 per gigabyte. Head over to the Vodafone site for more details.

Orange improve on that a little, with a £48.50 up-front cost for the modem followed by £19.57 for 3 gigabytes of usage. Orange operates on a 30 day contract, so if you don’t use your data in that time, it’s gone. If you’re a heavier user, £29.36 will get you 10 gigabytes for the 30 days. Check out the Orange site for more details.

Three round off the normal deals with a £48.93 modem and £10 for 1 gigabyte, again valid for 30 days. £15 will get you 3 gigabytes, and £25 gets you 7gb. Head over to Three’s site to buy.

t-Mobile and o2 take a different tactic – you can choose to buy an allowance for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how much you think you’ll use it. O2 will set you back £29.35 for the modem, and then £2 a day, £7.50 a week, or £15 for a month. Be warned if you’re high usage though – the allowances are extremely low compared to other networks, at 500 megabytes for the daily package, a gigabyte for the week, and 3 gigabytes if you opt for the monthly option. O2’s package is available here.

By contrast, T-Mobile have a huge 3 gigabyte per day fair usage policy on their packages, and will set you back £42.54 for the modem followed by £1.70 a day, or £8.51 a week, or £17.02 for 30 days. For both light and heavy users this is likely to be the best choice if you’re not willing to move up to a contract. T-Mobile’s mobile internet options can be found here.

Want to know about the contract options? Check back next week.

Yesterday, Jonathan Jensen tweeted that 3 offered his son an awesomely cheap £8 a month tariff when renewing his contract, and even dug out an old, discontinued tariff for him.  Seems like they’ll do anything to keep their customers in these difficult times!

When I switched from Orange to O2 they didn’t even try and stop me – I guess pay as you go customers aren’t all that important to them!

It’s true!  BillMonitor is out of beta.  With our latest release we’ve added the ability to search for handsets, so finally you can compare tariffs that give you the phone you want.  Try it out, it’s awesome.

In addition to that exciting development, we’ve added the iPhone and tweaked the internal cogs and gears to get everything running faster and smoother.  We’ve also changed the way that the front page looks to make our best features a little more obvious – drop by our uservoice page and let us know what you think.

Oh, and by the way, you can now become a fan of us on Facebook!

The scheduled maintenance is now complete. If anyone was having a problem doing certain searches on T-Mobile plans, this should now be resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience.