The price plans that have been released — from O2, Orange and Vodafone — are rather convoluted, with mind-melting, eye-bleeding charts. O2’s announcement even lead to an email exchange between a bewildered Barry Collins and a losing-the-will-to-live myself, as we tried to understand whether they were or weren’t selling the iPhone at the same upfront cost regardless of contract length (they are, but it depends on how you look at it. We think. Maybe.)

Here’s our stripped-down chart to help you get started — click on it to view it in a larger size, but it’s also available here, which is probably easier to look at than the one embedded below.

Keep in mind some contracts include more features than others, with European roaming and more included in some.

How much will it cost?

So which is the cheapest contract? Again, that depends on how you look at it. The cheapest overall total cost of ownership for the 16GB version is on a £30/month, 18-month contract with O2. But while that rings in at just £749, you can get the same phone for £759 at Vodafone, doubling your mobile downloads for £10 spread over 18 months — giving you an extra 500MB per month for £0.55. O2 would charge an extra £5 per 500MB per month.

Alternatively, you could upgrade from the 16GB to the 32GB over a two-year-contract for just £44, doubling your storage for under £2 a month.

The most intriguing thing to note is how frequently the offers between rival operators work out nearly the same — identically, in a few cases. Both O2 and Vodafone offer the 16GB version for free on their top end monthly charges. The upfront cost, monthly cost, and data downloads are exactly the same, with a total cost of £1170.

It’s also worth nothing that committing for two long years might not save you anything over signing up for a shorter 18-month contract, especially on O2.

If Orange is your preferred operator, buyer beware. While the three operators are quite similar on mid-range contracts, Orange’s total cost wanders higher than its rivals on the low and high end of the scale.

With the total cost of its cheapest iPhone costing £100 more than an arguably comparable package from Vodafone, Orange also has the most expensive way to get an iPhone on our chart, with the 32GB version on a two-year, £75 contract coming in at a whopping £1,829 — but that also includes tethering, Wi-Fi, 100 European minutes and 20MB of roaming data, which would add up pretty quickly on one of the other networks.

The iPhone 4 can also be bought SIM-free straight from Apple, with only Orange currently offering prices for its pay-as-you-go plans. These include 250MB of internet access for a year. That could be the cheapest way to get the iPhone 4, but not if you intend to use it for anything other than as an object d’art to gaze admiringly at.

Click here for the updated version of the chart.

Surely that should read “Unlimited per month – £25[1]”

“[1] Or nearest offer. We’re having a laugh, you might as well, too.”

I mean honestly, what are these people playing at?

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

Mr Graham used this revelation to repeat his calls for “deterrent custodial sentences” to “stop the trade in unlawful personal information”. What he wasn’t prepared to do, however, was name the network involved – the very company who had a legal duty to protect its customers’ data. “We are preparing a prosecution case, and it would obviously prejudice a prosecution,” said a spokesperson, when asked why the ICO had taken a sudden vow of silence.

Of course, it took us no longer than two or three hours to work out who the guilty party was. Britain only has five major mobile networks – once we’d got the blanket denials from the other four, T-Mobile had little choice but to release a confession, issuing a mightily ironic riposte to the Information Commissioner for breaching its confidentiality in the process.

No-one’s disputing the fact that the real villains here were the members of staff who stole the data and sold it to the brokers – indeed, in some respects, T-Mobile was as much a victim as the people who had their details pilfered. But something was inherently wrong with an IT system that allowed employees to steal thousands of customer records and seemingly go undetected for months.  And there’s something even more wrong with an Information Commissioner that pledges to “promote openness by public bodies” and then tries to hide the identity of companies who fail to protect their customers’ data.  Not to mention the fact he’s now given T-Mobile’s lawyers a cast iron defence should any prosecution actually materialise (“The case has been prejudiced, m’lud”).

Abject ad watchdog

The Information Commissioner isn’t the only watchdog you can barely hear bark, let alone see it bite. Take the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I’ve lamented its abysmal failure to clamp down on the worst excesses of broadband providers in the past – ads for “unlimited broadband” that have strictly defined limits, for instance.

Yet, its ineffectiveness reached new lows in a recent adjudication against Vodafone. The ASA upheld a complaint made against adverts claiming the network had “abolished” its roaming charges, when in fact Vodafone had merely postponed the charges for a few months. (Vodafone, incidentally, made a valiant attempt to redefine the word “abolished” in its defence to the ASA, the comical details of which you can read here.)

Being a summer campaign, Vodafone stopped running the adverts at the end of August. The ASA issued its adjudication on 28 October. The sanction? “The ads must not appear again in their current form.” Bravo.

The ASA has a staff budget of more than £5 million, according to its most recent annual report. Yet it takes an average of 66 days to resolve complaints that require investigation. Even if an industry-funded body is never going to dish out fines to the companies that pay its way, is it really too much to ask for it to deal with complaints more promptly?

Ofcom go-slow

Then again, when it comes to quick responses, we should all bow to the undisputed procrastination masters, Ofcom. Back in 2007, Ofcom told mobile phone networks they would have to transfer customers’ numbers from one network to another within two hours by September this year.  However, Ofcom’s plans were waylaid when the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) ruled that it had had got its sums wrong over the cost of implementing such measures. Ofcom said it would cost £5m, Vodafone successfully argued it would cost closer to £37m, so it was only out by a factor of seven or eight.

Now Ofcom has had to start the whole tedious process from scratch, and says it “aims to have any new porting process arrangements in place during 2011”. (“These things take time,” an Ofcom spokesperson told me.)  Oh, and instead of two hours, it’s now considering watering down the transfer time to one working day.

With watchdogs like these, who needs enemies?

For the last few days, I’ve had to “rely” on mobile broadband as I wait for my broadband connection to go live in my new house. The trouble is, it doesn’t work at all well. The first problem is reception: I don’t live in central London but in deepest Bucks, and that means I can only get a GPRS connection.

Or at least, I could. On Saturday last, I had a solid connection for an hour, and though browsing was a slow, awkward affair (anyone remember dial-up?) I managed to get a few things done, and make myself numerous cups of coffee in the spare minutes as I waited for pages to load.

But then, firing up my laptop on Sunday, I was faced with a series of error messages. And, as with all error messages, the recommended steps were of no use whatsoever. I’ve since worked out that it was due to two processes working at the same time (why doesn’t the error message say this is the likely cause?) but as the processes aren’t terribly easy to kill I only had success after a couple of reboots.

And today comes the final nail in my mobile broadband coffin. I’m sitting on the train writing this, with a Vodafone dongle sitting proudly in my machine, but travelling from Aylesbury to London I’ve barely managed a solid connection of longer than five minutes. GPRS network detected, it says. By the time it’s gone through its handshake procedure, we’ve shifted onto another network. GPRS network detected. Signal very poor.

The fact is, I can’t do anything like this. I’ve sent two emails and read five in the same time I’d have sent a dozen and read 50 normally. It’s a long way from being productive. And it’s unfair to single out Vodafone – I’ve had similar experiences with 3, and its software is even worse than Vodafone’s.

Perhaps one day all this will be solved, but bearing in mind how long the 3G network has had to mature it’s incredibly disappointing that the service is so frustrating and unreliable, especially for people on the move. If it hasn’t been sorted by now, will it ever be?

I’ve just come back from the launch of the second Google Android phone to be released, and I must say I’m impressed. Its sleek profile and solid build quality are a world away from the dumpy and disappointing T-Mobile G1, which we reviewed at the back end of last year.

UPDATE: Read the full review here

It’s been manufactured by the same company as the G1 – HTC – the firm also behind the Touch Diamond2 we reviewed last week, and it’s available for free on a £35 per month tariff, which gets you 600 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data.

And while I’m none too keen on the fact that it’s only going to be available in white, I did warm immediately to the solid and sleek feel of this new Android phone. It weighs 118.5g and its dimensions  - 55mm wide, 113mm tall and just 13.65mm thick – make it extremely pocket friendly. The gloss finish, sculpted lines and oversized trackball all contribute to a sophisticated look that the G1 could only dream of.

Apart from the looks, though, the key difference is the on-screen touch keyboard and I was keen to try this out…

It’s a full-screen Qwerty affair that gets larger keys in landscape than in portrait mode; the Magic’s accelerometer ensures that the switch happens automatically depending on which way around you hold the phone. And there’s feedback, too – whenever you hit a key, the Magic trembles lightly in your hands. Disappointingly, there aren’t any alternative key layouts, unlike the BlackBerry Storm, which switches between Qwerty and two-letter-per-key mode.

But while it’s difficult to assess fully after a five minute play, first impressions are good. I made a few typos initially, but it didn’t seem over fiddly and the combination of the capacitive touchscreen (a la iPhone) with the feedback seemed to work effectively.

The phone’s Google Maps boasts the new Street View mode, a feature that Vodafone was keen to push during my introduction to the phone. And I can see why: in tandem with the phone’s built-in digital compass, it’s quite something to pick a location, and physically sweep the phone around left to right, even up and down to take a look at your surroundings. Among other new features, there’s now also instant uploads to Picasa, video recording and YouTube uploads.

But the hardware remains largely the same. The screen is still 3.2in in size and boasts a resolution of 320 x 480; it has a HSDPA data connection, GPS, an accelerometer and digital compass (as already mentioned), plus Bluetooth 2.0 and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

But what will make or break this phone is battery life – the G1 was appalling in this respect. This phone has a larger capacity battery, which should give longer life between charges.

We’ll post a full review when we get our hands on the phone, which will be in the next week.

Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets? If the reports that hit the headlines only yesterday are anything to go by, then the answer should be 160, as 40 of them are statistically likely to have been nicked during a violent street mugging. The Design Council survey, on which the headlines are based, revealed that 1 in 5 of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 in London had been victim of a mugging where an item of mobile personal electronics (mobile phone or iPod essentially) had been nicked.

The survey also found that two thirds of the youngsters interviewed carried no less than £100 worth of mobile kit around with them at all times, 61 percent of these kids were worried about theft funnily enough. Actually, not funny at all really, especially considering the 20 percent chance of ending up a victim of just such a crime. Rather surprisingly 42 percent of those victims admitted that they did not report the crime to the police, although the reasons are unclear one would hazard a guess that it falls somewhere between not trusting the old bill, being scared of reprisals or that they were using a mobile phone they had nicked from someone else the week before.

So perhaps the LIFEWISE project is coming at the right time, looking as it does for solutions amongst teenagers themselves to fight this type of violent crime. As Chris Nash, Mobile Learning Consultant at one of the sponsors, Steljes, says: “Handheld technology has allowed the pupils to work together on this project, regardless of where they are – whether in different locations or even different schools,” explains. Anytime Learning is about enhancing the learning experience by extending the school walls to wherever the pupils are and whenever the work is done. This in turn streamlines communications and allows students to share their work and ideas and to forge a more collaborative way of learning and working.”

Yeah, but, it’s no good if the mobile phone has been nicked or whatever…