gorilla
22nd May 2006, 12:18 PM
Mobile madness consumes the UK (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2776-2189680,00.html) from the Sunday Times.
Britain has more mobile phones than people. Barry Collins meets multi-mobile man to find out why 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.
Weve 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 dont 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: Ive 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 Ill ever need.
Amazingly, thats not the best bargain he has struck. Ive signed a few deals that cost absolutely nothing. There are shops offering a cashback incentive, where you buy one phone and line rental and theyll 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 years line rental back into your account. Ive 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. Its 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 its the retailers choice if they decide to roll cashback offers into their phone deals.
Sometimes its 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 Id 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 didnt know or couldnt be bothered.
Incredible cost savings arent 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: Im 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, its 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 wouldnt 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 theyre 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 Im 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. Its 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 cant 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 isnt much use if, like Sarah, youre permanently on call. Nokia agrees that two-Sim phones are feasible but says: Its 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 Prescotts 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 Temples 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 Vodafones 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 Alzheimers disease because they cannot remember all the data being thrown at them. And they call these things smart phones.
Britain has more mobile phones than people. Barry Collins meets multi-mobile man to find out why 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.
Weve 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 dont 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: Ive 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 Ill ever need.
Amazingly, thats not the best bargain he has struck. Ive signed a few deals that cost absolutely nothing. There are shops offering a cashback incentive, where you buy one phone and line rental and theyll 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 years line rental back into your account. Ive 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. Its 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 its the retailers choice if they decide to roll cashback offers into their phone deals.
Sometimes its 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 Id 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 didnt know or couldnt be bothered.
Incredible cost savings arent 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: Im 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, its 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 wouldnt 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 theyre 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 Im 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. Its 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 cant 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 isnt much use if, like Sarah, youre permanently on call. Nokia agrees that two-Sim phones are feasible but says: Its 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 Prescotts 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 Temples 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 Vodafones 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 Alzheimers disease because they cannot remember all the data being thrown at them. And they call these things smart phones.