Phone with contract for 11 years old!!!!

[Hera]

I just bought a Tesco HTC phone for my son's BD on O2. £10 a month capped. 250 minutes (which he prob won't use) 5000 texts and 1gb data. I haven't got insurance but he has been told that if he loses the phone he will have to buy himself a cheap replacement and I checked that they just issue you another sim and with the capped contract you can't run up bills if he doesn't notice straight away that it is missing. They do the same for £7.50 with 150 mins, 5000 texts and 500 data which would have been more that enough, but given he was keen for the extra data he paid half the extra 24 month contract towards it so £30 and I paid the other half.

This is a useful article of you are thinking of buying a phone for a child:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/ju ... yers-guide" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[modernista]

Agree about the expensive phone. DD wanted internet on phone so i got her a samsung then on deal at £50. It does everything but not very well. People who are looking to steal are very au fait with phone brands/ models etc and would not touch her phone. Also it is more likely to get returned if lost.

[Elvy]

I just bought a Tesco HTC phone for my son's BD on O2. £10 a month capped. 250 minutes (which he prob won't use) 5000 texts and 1gb data. I haven't got insurance but he has been told that if he loses the phone he will have to buy himself a cheap replacement and I checked that they just issue you another sim and with the capped contract you can't run up bills if he doesn't notice straight away that it is missing. They do the same for £7.50 with 150 mins, 5000 texts and 500 data which would have been more that enough, but given he was keen for the extra data he paid half the extra 24 month contract towards it so £30 and I paid the other half.

This is a useful article of you are thinking of buying a phone for a child:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/ju ... yers-guide" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Me and my husband had a long discussion about this, (getting the eldest a phone but not the other child) and we decided to get him a phone. I share the opinion to get him a cheap phone because it's just for emergencies actually. So I went on the internet and looked for a discount which I found here, also for Tesco. So we passed the point of it being expensive, but there was still the immaterial matter of him getting a phone. I guess it's just that you can't recognize yourself in that situation, because we had no mobile phones in our youth. But in a practical way it's a good thing to know that you can have a direct line with your child. But it still feels a bit odd, does anybody know this feeling too?

[Okanagan]

But looking back we always had the 10p (or even 2p if you're old enough! ) in a pocket for an emergency phone call, and you were never that far from a call box. The demise of that infrastructure means that once they're old enough to be out and about independently any distance from home (which is probably synonymous in many cases with moving to secondary school) access to a basic phone - albeit only for emergency use - becomes almost essential now.

[Minesatea]

We are also with tesco. If you need more than one contract you can set up "family perks". This lets you add an extra to each contract. We bought cheap no data deals for the children and then added 250mb data as the perk. Alternatively you can add more minutes or texts.
Be aware that their capped contracts do stop you dialing premimum rate numbers, in some cases this is good, but for me means I can't ring my GP surgery!

[sbarnes]

Vodafone are doing contract at mo; £7.50 a month gets 500 texts and 300 mins calls. Also unlimited web for 3 months and thereafter 250mb per month.

[moved]

My two are with Virgin. £9.60 per month for unlimited everything. The best other deal we found was about £10 per month with Tesco. You can put parental limits on their web access.

[KS10]

We are with Virgin too. DS has a cheap Tesco phone (£10) and his contract is a fiver a month - 100 free minutes, 1000 texts and free Virgin to Virgin calls. He uses his phone in emergencies only. He tends to use his iPod Touch to communicate with his friends.