Worth waiting for 4S price to come down?

Only after the iPhone 5 is announced, likely in September.

Depends on what you mean by "come down in price". There are still some deals that want money for a 3GS never mind a 4. Personally, I don't think the prices will come down very much at all, I think the deals for the 5 will just be more expensive - market forces and all that.

The 4s will drop £70 (off contract) and slot in to the 4 position.  You may not notice more than a few quid per month across a subsidised contract however.  

 

How long have you been with your network?  Ring them up and ask to speak to terminations and twist their arm, you may be able to save the difference off your tariff.

O2 (via carphone warehouse) are doing a "free" 16gb 4S for £32 a month (200 min, unlimited texts, 500Gb data).  A few places have the same deal with £50 cashback.

 

of course it's hard to beat buying the phone from Apple for £499 and the signing up for an excellent value deal from GiffGaff...

Depends if you have £500 up front which unfortunately many of us don't
I too went for the Carphone Warehouse deal, though I'm with T-Mobile. I paid £20 for the phone, £31 per month, but the data and minutes are higher than O2 was offering. Swings and roundabouts I guess!
I still think 750MB is stingy this day and age. Having a data-cap on your sim contract will look anachronistic in a few years time. Five years ago, domestic broadband capping was still common, now just about every ISP offers an 'unlimited' service so long as you comply with their fair-use caveats. #I reckon contract sims will go the same way. I know there are some unlimited deals now, but you have to pay through the nose for them because presumably they're aimed at business users.

I've only had the phone a month and it's a two year contract. Maybe when the iPhone 5 comes out I'll wish I held off for a while. But I doubt it; I don't get upgradeitis (have you seen my HiFi) and besides, it's usually better to skip a generation to notice any real substantial improvements.

Tesco Mobile's currently flogging a 'free' 4S 16GB  for £40/month, which includes 3,000 mins, 5,000 texts and 1GB data. It's a 24-month contract and the network is actually O2 - clickety

Apart from handing over one's hard-earned to Tesco, what's the catch? 

heh.  given what a pointless luxury a "smartphone" is - if you can't afford it outright, perhaps your money is better spent elsewhere. 

 

Works out as £960.  Three can do 2000 mins, 5000 texts, all you can eat data and £49 up front for £34 per month. Works out as £865 over two years.  Might be better if you don't need the minutes but need the data?  Three let you use your data for tethering.

It could be argued the catch is handing over £960 for a service they know you'll never use: who on earth sends an average of 164 texts a day while also spending an average of over 98 minutes a day gassing? They offer stratospheric text and calls allowances because such things are cheap to offer. I'd rather see those silly text and minutes quotas reduced by upto 9/10ths but the 1GB data allowance doubled

Sounds good, apart from Three being the worst network IME - always struggled to get signal, even in central London.

Only time I ever had full bars was when in the middle of the field at the IoW Festival

Hi,

Thanks for interesting points indeed. Similar thread going on over in the networks forum in which RS mentioned a £8 per month sim only deal from Three which, unless I'm misreading things, looks very much like the One Plan. If you could afford your phone up front and go with giff Gaff or a deal such as the one from three, you'd make some savings I guess, but over a 24month period, I'm not sure how big they'd really be. Especially if, like me, you're looking at a 32GB phone, the £600 rrp for which does rather dent the pounds per month value of a giff gaff type option.

 

It depends on the contract I got my HTC One X on a 2 year contract. The total price of the contract was roughly equal to the full new price of the phone, except in the contract I get 2 years unlimted 3G. Buying it would have been worse than stupid.

Yes, but my point was in spending £500 on the phone, you can avail of cheaper tariffs that mean a lower price over 24 months.  Your case is different, a deal where the phone and price plan is cheaper by signing up to a full contract.

There are few deals like this at the minute - Nokia Lumia 800 (with free Beats headphones, apparently worth £199) on a £15.50 a month contract with Orange (but you'll need to pay extra for a data bundle).  It means that the monthly fee over 24 months is pretty much the same as the phone's sim-free cost.

The way this works best is if you want to change phone every year (or sooner). A quick check on trade-in sites tells me I can get around £250 for my iPhone 4 (more if I went down the eBay route). So, I've lost around £250 in depreciation and shelled out £15 a month on SIM only. Cost this year is effectively £430. A £40 per month contract would have cost me £480, but I'd still have a year to run.

So, I'm ahead financially and can change phone whenever I want. That could mean buying an S3 now, and then if I decide I don't like it, sell it and buy something else, each time just having to cover the depreciation. When you're changing so quickly, the depreciation is a lot lower.