O2 iPhone contract ended? Here are some options..

By now many of the people who got the iPhone 3G in the first few months of its contract will have finished the 18 month contract. So what to do?

Whatever you end up doing did you know you can unlock your O2 iPhone free of charge so you can use it on any network? Well its free if you are a contract customer anyway, £15 for Pay as You Go customers. All you need to do is fill in this form.

You will after a while (up to 10 days) get a text message saying our iPhone is unlocked and then you just plug it into iTunes and you get a message saying that the phone is unlocked. You can now upgrade at any time without the worry that your phone will be re-locked by Apple as with the unofficial unlocking.

Sell your old iPhone

So now you have an unlocked iPhone you need to decide if you want to keep it or sell it. Unlocked iPhone 3Gs are getting good prices on eBay so take a look at completed items there if you want an idea of value.

Move to a SIM only contract

If you are keeping your iPhone the cheapest option is to move to a SIM only contract, many of these are available on a 30 day monthly basis so there is no long contract and you can pay very little and get a lot for your money, a few options are:

T-Mobile - incredibly only £10 a month gets you 100 mins, 100 texts and unlimited Internet
02 Simplicity - stay with 02 and £20 a month gets you 600 mins, 1200 texts and unlimited Internet
Vodafone - £20 a month gets 600mins, unlimited texts and 500Mb Internet

Remember if you are moving to another operator to call O2 and ask for a PAC code which will trigger your contract to be canceled.

Get a new iPhone contract

If you want a new iPhone, probably a 3GS then you now have lots of choice, 4 operators sell the iPhone in the UK so check out:

O2 (this would be an Upgrade if you are an O2 customer already)
Orange
Tesco
Vodafone

Of course you might decide to get an Android handset or something else rather than a new iPhone!

Vodafone Sure Signal...one week on

I blogged a review a week ago about the Vodafone Sure Signal and it has attracted quite a few comments. There are also several discussions on Vodafone's Web Forums.

Some users report problems setting the device up, others problems once in service and that is what happened to me today. For some reason a problem killed the network at home and the Sure Signal rebooted itself but wasn't working at all and just showed the top power light constantly lit.

The device doesn't come with any manual just a very brief leaflet so I turned for help the web forums mentioned above. After some digging around it seemed likely that the issue was with ports being blocked by the router. Now I have a somewhat elderly but trusty Draytek 2600 router and know my way around the config screens so I assigned the Sure Signal a fixed IP address on my network and found a downloadable guide from Vodafone.

This shows the ports that need to be forwarded to the Sure Signal on the router, they are:

Protocol	Port	Description
IP	50	ESP
UDP	4500	IPSEC NAT Traversal
UDP	500	ISAKMP

I set these up and it restarted fine. The difficulty here is that this requires quite a bit of technical knowledge and each router had a different configuration. The information is also a little difficult to find on the Vodafone site, hidden away on a forum...

Backupify

These days if you're anything like me a big part of your life will be stored online in the so-called "cloud". I've got this Blog, my Facebook and Twitter, loads of photos on Flickr not to mention email and files on Google Mail.

Now on one level this is more re-assuring than having it all on your own PC, after all Google's servers are less likely to fail than my laptop, right? Well probably but if they do then would they have a backup? How long would it take to get it back?

One answer is to ensure you have it all stored at home as well and this might work fine for photos etc but for real cloud based services (Facebook, Twitter, Blogger etc) this isn't so easy. And also making sure you remember to keep those photos you uploaded from Flickr on holiday from your laptop on a desktop at home might be a problem.

Backupify is one possible answer to this. It provides a currently free (if you sign up now) automated backup service which stores your content on Amazon's S3 storage service with a web front end. Sign up at http://www.backupify.com, run through the setup which in most cases uses the normal API authentication to services that means Backupify doens't need to store your username and password.

I've used the service since just after Christmas and it seems to work fine. It did take a few days to actually get all my content but now I can login and actually browse and see the content (which is reassuring) and every day it emails me a report on what it has backed up - so tonight I should get one saying it has backed this article up!

One slight word of caution, there seem to have been some issues with Gmail backup so I haven't used that yet. Not sure how long this will stay free for but it might be worth paying for? But it is currently free so worth a look.