  |  Pilot Light Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 366 |
EXPIRED - Unlocked Motorola F3: £17.99 with £17 free Virgin airtime plus £3 Quidco!!
£17.99
This phone is for minimalists or people with not-so-good eyesight, or people who need a back-up phone or one for holidays. Read the reviews before you buy, it is probably the phone with the fewest features in the world. Having said that, I love it!
THE DEAL:
Go for the cheaper of the three networks, pay £18.99 and get the phone delivered free next day by special delivery. It comes with a Virgin SIM card that will have £12 of airtime after you register it ONLINE (£2 extra), bringing the cost of the phone down to £6.99. Plus you get get Quidco discount on top of that. e2save advertise £7.50 discount on Virgin SIM cards, but mine is currently tracking at £3 per phone. If it increases, then you will actually get paid £0.51 to buy it!
The phone has a twelve day standby time, 4.5 hours talk time, and is unlocked. It features a new type of black and white "e-paper" screen which uses hardly any power, Yet it has fantastic clarity in bright sunlight right down to very low levels, below which the keypad lights are sufficient.
The screen display is really big and has helpful voice prompts in English, German and Italian. The speaker-phone on it is great! Loud ring and vibrate too.
Bought two for my parents in their 80s, and one for me. All separate purchases, as you only get one Quidco discount per transaction.
UPDATE: Thanks to walerah for reminding me that the phone comes with £5 of credit, but this is is not an error. To get the extra, all you need to do is register the sim online with Virgin Mobile to receive the remaining balance (£5 + £2 registration bonus) and the full credit may take up to 10 days.
Also Fennie advises that e2save emailed to say there is a 7 day delay on these now with Virgin SIM card.
I guess there is a bit of a rush now! Site still appears to be accepting orders though.
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Delay now 10 days
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Delay now 14 days
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Delay now 17 days - see recent comments in thread for latest delay status!
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Registered the phone this morning online. Was credited with £15.00 Virgin airtime and not £12 as publicised. Don't know why. This brings cost of phone down to £1 with Quidco, or possibly a few pounds less, depending on final Quidco discount.
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UNBELIEVABLE AS IT SOUNDS - the registered card seems to have had another £2 of credit added around 24 hours after it was first registered - total Virgin Airtime credit is now £17. As the phone only cost £19 with at least £3 Quidco discount (may rise to £7.50), you are being paid to but this phone, and it is delivered free. Amazing
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With Virgin you have an option to pay by monthly direct debit, but don't, as it seems to mess up their systems (comment #95 has details)
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Backlog cleared as of 13/8, phones now shipping. Credit applied on card appears to be 1) £5 Virgin - on card, 2) £2 extra credit from Virgin when you register online, usually within 24 hrs and 3) £10 airtime, credited by e2save 0-8 days after purchase. Total credit £17, Quidco discount currently tracking at £3.00 (unchanged)
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GOOD NEWS: The final £10 was automatically credited to the phone today, 10 days after purchase, making £17 airtime total. I can also confirm there is no problem with setting up a direct debit, you still get all the airtime. So this phone costs £2, PLUS your Quidco bonus currently tracking at £3!!! As of 16 August, the offer is still on, so go get em guys and gals!!!
- mouseclick
STRANGE BUT TRUE... the price has fallen by a further pound to £17.99!!!!! My Quidco cashback has now been validated at £3.00, so you get paid £2 to buy this phone!
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5lab:
a mate of mines got one - they're pretty rubbish for texting - only 2 lines of display with maybe 10 characters per line - but they last forever - as a phone to take to a festival etc they're unbeatable - 10 days standby i think. But the price is incredible, and I have fallen in love with the phone's simplicity (by the way my hi-tech first phone is a Sony Ericsson K550i and I wouldn't want to swap for this). Has anyone reading this got any experience of Quidco cashback on Virgin SIMs? Do they track as £3 and go up to £7.50 when validated? Have a look at http://www.quidco.com/e2save/. I have submitted an earnings query, but it may be ages before I find out. Not that I am complaining at the current price  |
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iDeal:
bit of an old phone but a good deal thank you  Actually it is brand new, only a few months into production I think, and has ground breaking technology such as a electrophoretic display that will soon be used in the One Laptop Per Child Project. Read this http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03...a_motofone_f3/ and this http://nickbaum.com/2007/01/motofone/, when it was only available in India in January 2007Minimalist is not "old"! By the way, this happened to me: "Using the F3 is a straightforward affair once you've stopped looking for the menus that aren't there because this phone doesn't do what you other phones do."Here's 2 comments from another review http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/02/19...a-motofone-f3/ stemming from the India one: "Nick: What do you like best about the phone? Me: I’d have to say the large characters that display the time, the visibility of the screen, and the intuitiveness of the interface (after you take 10 minutes to learn it, mainly because we’ve all been conditioned to expect a lot of counter-intuitive interfaces from phones). Oh, and the price. You just can’t beat a $40 price tag on a phone that looks this good."This Video is excellent!!!! >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwHPK1LMXtk Last edited by mouseclick : 09-08-2007 at 09:35. |
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I have one of these phones, but it's with Orange
Had abit of fuss at first because it didn't come with a phone number(so activating it was impossible).. i phoned the activation number, i think i pressed # for every question and finally got through to a human.. after about 11minutes(using my dad's mobile on T-Mobile), i managed to get my phone in a usable state(with the Orange phone, you can't use it until you've registered it with Orange) So.. now i have a usable phone, very slim(hasn't fallen out of my pocket, yet :P), free 1pound credit(received a few hours after activation) and with what i hear is a long battery life. I've had it for about 4days now, have it turned off for about 10hours overnight, but on during the day, i turned it on this morning and it had 3bars left out of 5, didn't notice that it even went down to 4bars, but oh well.. eitherway, the phone is good for a cheap phone, i wouldn't even bother trying to send(or read) a text message for that matter, but calls are nice and clear EDIT: I will say one thing though, I was under the impression(after reading the Wikipedia page) that it wasn't region locked.. but trying a T-Mobile SIM card in it just told me it was locked out :( |
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apocralypse :- No sales talk here
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Last edited by Hso : 09-08-2007 at 05:41. |
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thesaint:
Sorry for the silly question, but can anyone point out where it says that the phone is unlocked? So far though, all the 3 Virgin ones I have ordered (they don't like you buying more than 3 and I think this may be because of Quidco) are unlocked. If anyone finds that one is locked, please report it here, and I guess it would help if others here confirmed their phones were unlocked when they get them. I bought mine two days ago, and just got another this morning by Special Delivery... they didn't block all of my two orders yesterday it seems. sticking O2 SIM in... BINGO O2 UK comes up on screen, test call, yes it works. I can't vouch for the state of the dearer phones bought from e-2save on the T-mobile or Orange network. I have tested mine on O2, T-mobile and with United Mobile's UM+ card*. I have an Orange card here too, let me try... yes it works. If you know someone that has bought a Motofone F3 advertised as being on either Orange or T-mobile, and you know the state of it's SIM lock, I guess it is likely to be the same if you buy it from e2save (should you be inclined to pay more than £3.99 ).The Wikipedia page says "According to its very low price (starting from 20 to 30 €/$) the F3/F3c is mainly sold with prepaid (pay-as-you-go) SIM cards and it seems that the sellers often (but not always) don't bother to implement a SIM-lock, so many units can be used with any SIM card." * It accepts a United Mobile+ Card, but only for receiving calls. You can't use it to make calls because you need to use menu dialling for UM+, and this phone has no menus! Last edited by mouseclick : 09-08-2007 at 15:38. Reason: added *note at end |
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