Features

O2 Active

The mobile internet service from O2 (www.o2.co.uk) is decidedly old school, based around the network's own WAP portal, O2 Active. You get access to a range of recognisable sites, including eBay, Sky and the BBC, plus entertainment portals from magazines including Glamour, Heat and FHM. Web browsing is limited to reduced, 'made for mobile' sites rather than the true, free internet.

O2 offers full browsing on its top-of-the-range smartphones in its Xda range, including the WiFi-enabled Xda Orbit and Xda Graphite. Both phones use Windows Mobile and have Pocket Internet Explorer. Both products are available for free on an 18-month contract.

O2 still retains an antiquated pricing structure for consumer mobile data. Pay-monthly high street tariffs of less than £35 a month include a miserly 100KB browsing allowance. This increases to a paltry 512KB for tariffs over £35 a month. Buying online increases the allowance to 1MB on all tariffs. Regular internet users will almost certainly need to add a Consumer Data Bolt On; each month you can get an extra 2MB of data for £3, 4MB of data for £5 or 20MB of data for £10. This applies to Pay As You Go customers too.

Orange World

Mobile internet on Orange (www.orange.co.uk) is similar to that of O2, as it's centred around the dedicated network

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portal Orange World. Like O2 Active it offers a variety of content from the worlds of sport, music and film in a bite-size, made-for-mobile format. Orange World is available on a diverse range of GPRS and 3G handsets from all the top manufacturers, plus EDGE devices such as Motorola's RAZR2 V8. The best internet experience is found on its SPV range of Windows Mobile handsets. The pick of the bunch is the SPV E650, a compact smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.0 with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

All Orange tariffs ranging from £20-£75 a month come with an initial two months free browsing, after which they include a daily surcharge of £1.50 for unlimited browsing (up to 25MB fair usage). Contract customers can add an unlimited evening and weekend browsing bundle for £5 a month, or for £4 a month can get 4MB of data at any time (with a £1 charge for each additional megabyte). Alternatively, contract customers can buy data for £3 per megabyte on a pay-as-you-use basis. Prepay customers pay a daily charge of £1 to access Orange World, no matter how much data they use.

T-Mobile web'n'walk

T-Mobile (www.t-mobile.co.uk) was the first network to launch an unlimited data package for a fixed monthly fee in 2005, with its pioneering web'n'walk tariffs. They are still just as popular today, and other networks have followed suit with similar packages of their own. The built-in web'n'walk software has a direct link to the Google homepage and links to frequently accessed internet sites, including T-Mobile's own network portal, T-zones.

A wide variety of web'n'walk handsets are available, ranging from stylish everyday phones such as Samsung's U600 slider and Sony Ericsson's W880i Walkman to advanced smartphones including Nokia's N95. T-Mobile has its fair share of Windows Mobile devices too, including the MDA Vario series of PDA-like phones with slide-out keyboards, and the futuristic Ameo device with its 5in screen and detachable magnetic keyboard.