Mobiles and pricing plans in the late 90s / early 00s?

[Pawnless Endgame]

At around 1997/8, mobiles entered the mainstream and were no longer only for emergency use. It became the essential item for students, clubbers and geeks alike. The indestructible Nokia 3210 and 3310 were the source of envy. The smaller the phone, the more fashionable it was.

The providers were Orange, BT Cellnet, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

I was a bit late on the bandwagon - my first being a Nokia 5110 ("Nokia 402" under Orange) which was a 1998 model but I didn't get it until September 2000. That thing still had an ariel! At the relatively old age I was (22) as well, most people would have been on their 2nd or 3rd phone by 2000. At least my Nokia 5110 was bought outright for £60 with a PAYG sim and it lasted me 4 years.

I know we sometimes get threads about old computer adverts - how much a computer was in 1999 and what the specs were. So I thought I'd ask the same here in the phones section. Maybe leaflets or historic web sites showing phone models and pricing plans? Or just from your memory - how much do you remember the monthly rate being for a Nokia 3210 or 3310? And of course, contracts only lasted for 1 year back then!

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

I had the same first phone on Orange. I'm sure at the time I was limited to 10 free texts a day and you couldn't send any more than that even if you had plenty of credit!
I had a lime green front cover on mine

Cool! I remember you could change the fascias on that phone. Mine was a deep blue colour. There was also a web site called "Bolt Blue" where you could change the splash logo on the screen, so instead of having the Orange logo, it displayed an anime character As for the 10 texts limit, what I remember of that phone is that the phone itself could only store 10 text messages! So if the phone already had 10 txts on it and another txt arrives, it would sit on a server somewhere until you deleted one of your quota. Then only after you did that you would receive your new txt. Also, if someone sent you a long text message (more than 160 characters IIRC), the Nokia 402 / 5110 would receive it as multiple-split messages, taking up more than 1 space in your 10-txt quota!

They were actually Orange, BT Cellnet, One2One and Vodafone.

My bad there! One2One does ring a bell now you said it, although I forgot that they eventually became T-Mobile.

Back in 1999 when Orange launched the Everyday 50 tariff, which was 50p per day and gave you 50 mins of calls after 19:00 every day, if you knew how and had a compatible handset you could configure it as a Line 2, and it would cost only 25p per day, team it with the cheapest Orange 60 minute/30 minute tariff and you could be spending less than £20 a month, have two numbers and a great phone for free due to taking the higher end tariff as Line 1.

I remember Everyday 50 as a mate of mine had it. Orange stopped it for new customers in 2001 IIRC, but existing customers were able to hang onto that contract for as long as they like. That's because if the customer didn't do anything after 1 year, the contract auto-renewed and was thus still bound to it. He stuck with it until around 2005, years after it ended for most people. I didn't know about the line 2 "hack" though