h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So I haggled and I won!

I'm getting a beast of a phone: A Samsung galaxy Note II LTE.

I reduced my monthly bill by £1.

I will pay £70 for the phone but they gave me a 16GB memory card for free.

(and I can trade in my old phone for £62.50)

Pay heed my fellow hunters of bargains. Shop around and give them the challenge of making you a better offer.

-----------

Details:


EE's initial offer was I £50 upfront and £37pcm over two years.

The issue was Phones For You were offering a better contract (500 minutes, Unlimited texts AND data) and a special offer for the free 16GB memory card and £70 on downloads.

There was all for a Galaxy Note II as a much reduced upfront value of £29 and £26PCM compared to EE's above offer.

I gave that to the guys in EE and asked them to make me a better offer.

What they came up with was this:

£26 PCM for 300 minutes, 500 texts and 1GB of data.

iI might be helpful to know my averages over 3 months were a mere 99 texts, 159 minutes and 850MB data used. (I'm obviously a heavy internet user!)

So this offer did not meet P4U in terms of capacity BUT what it did offer was to INCLUDE calls to 0800, 0870, 0844 and 0845 numbers (i.e whenever I call the EON to ask about a bill and sit on hold - that will come out of my contracted monthly minutes.) on P4U's offer I would be billed for this. It also includes free calls to UK landlines, so calling home basically., which P4U's offer didn't.

Then we come to the issue of cost.

After much nudging, EE dropped my PCM charge by £1 to £25. This you can view as an over-all saving of £42 over the two years or you can take that and theoretically subtract it from the cost of the phone (£69.99) so the phone effectively "cost" £27.99

Is one way of looking at it.

After ringing the area manager to get approval, they also gave me FOR FREE the 16BG memory card.

So on balance, I think that EE came up with just the better offer (P4U's thresholds far exceed my usage and don't include any of the fringe benefits) and my PCM bill is cheaper than I currently pay and what P4U wanted me to pay.

Oh and in case I didn't mention I'm going to get out of this a 1.6Ghz quad-core with 2GB RAM 5 " HD AMOLED screen with Android Jelly Bean (4.1)

- for **LESS** than I am currently paying.

I call that: winning.

Slow down, I'm running out of fingers!

I will probably need two hands to lift it. It's a big boy!