Best Buys: Cheapest Mobile Phone Insurance
There’s nothing cheaper than free, so when renewing your mobile contract, haggle hard to get it included. If not:
Step 1: Benchmark your mobile network’s cost.
Most of the mobile networks charge around £70/year for mobile insurance, regardless of handset value. For those with expensive handsets, this can be good value as standalone insurers usually take replacement cost into account.
Policies vary, especially in terms of excess levels and fraudulent calls cover, so use the network by network breakdown to get basic info, then check it out before comparing the other policies. Of course, if the network’s insurance isn’t much more expensive, the convenience of having it all in one can make it a prime pick.
Step 2: Compare it to the cheapest standalone cover.
It’s also possible to get cover from FSA regulated online specialist mobile insurers, who offer strong policies with good fraudulent calls cover. With these, lose your phone and they’ll send you the handset, while your network replaces the SIM card (usually for free).
To find the cheapest we compared over 20 policies, yet as this is a new guide, feedback on customer service is still limited..
- Handsets under £200: Talkcover from £1.87/monthFor handsets worth under £200, pay for a year and TalkCover usually costs £22.40 (equiv. £1.87/mth) or £2.50 on a month by month basis. There’s no exact science to this though; always get a specific quote as cover cost depends on each phone, but for most lower end phones it’s the winner.All Talkcover’s policies pay out on water damage and unnattended theft (excluding iPhones), and it also promises to get a replacement to you within 48 hours.
Need to insure more than one handset? Talkcover also offers big discounts if you insure a few handsets at once. For example, it’ll insure 3 phones worth up to £500 each for £7.49/month in total (i.e. £2.50 each), making it easily the best option if you’ve an expensive handset and can persuade your family to join you in getting covered.
QUICK FACTS. Price: £1.87/month (pay annually) Water damage/unattended theft: Yes Replacement Time: 48 hrs Excess: £25-50 Fraudulent Calls: £100 Overseas Cover: 60 days
- Handsets over £200: CUSC from £4.17/monthSpecialist insurer CUSC insurance has been offering mobile insurance since 1989 and it has decent feedback. Its FoneGuard policy costs £50 a year (equiv. £4.17/month) or £4.99 on a month-by-month basis. This applies regardless of your handset’s value, so it’s worth comparing with TalkCover (see above) to see which wins.It offers the highest level of fraudulent call cover, up to £250, yet on the downside its unattended theft cover only extends to handsets stolen with the use of force- if you lose your handset yourself and no force is involved you won’t be covered. The excess is £25, or £50 if you’re insuring a 3G handset.
QUICK FACTS. Price: £4.17/month (pay annually) Water damage/ theft: Yes Replacement Time: 3 days Excess: £25-50 Fraudulent Calls: £250 Overseas Cover: Yes
It’s worth noting, the big high st. mobile chains also offer insurance when you get your phone with them. Of those, Carphone Warehouse’s Geek Squad policies and The Link’s Link plan can be competitive, depending on your handset value, but the rest tend to be pretty poor.
Take Precautions: Protect your mobile & data
Losing your mobile phone can be a nightmare of lost data, contacts and fraudulent calls. Yet there are a number of easy ways to protect your mobile and data for free.
Protect against fraudulent phone use
The main benefit of taking out a dedicated mobile insurance policy is that it’ll usually cover you (to varying degrees) for calls made from your phone whilst you’ve no control over it. For Pay As You Go users this isn’t such an issue, but contract customers could wind up liable for £100s. Yet whichever system you use, there are some precautions which can limit your liability:
- Report your loss quickly.It’s imperative you report your phone’s disappearance to your network as soon as it’s apparent; it can bar further use within minutes plus your insurance maybe invalidated if you don’t report it within 48 hrs. Once you’ve done that you’ll need a crime reference for your insurance. To do this pop into or call your local police station, though not via 999. You should be able to quickly find your local station’s number on the web, or using a Free Directory Enquiries phone number.
- Set a credit limit.Some providers will allow you to set a maximum credit limit for calls each month. Go past the limit, and further outgoing calls will be blocked.
- Bar international calls.If you don’t use your mobile to call abroad from the UK ask your network to bar international calls. This ought to stop charges getting too out of hand before the phone’s reported.
Back up for free; practice safe text
Regardless of how expensive your phone is, it’s likely that the info you’ve got stored on it’s more valuable. It can be quite a headache to get your list of contacts back together on a new handset if you’ve had one nicked, so backing up your contacts and any media is a must. There are a few ways to do it:
- Connect to your PC:Most modern phones will be supplied with a cable and some software to connect them to your computer. This software is usually designed to sync calendars and address books, but you can use just use it to store numbers. If your handset didn’t come with software, there are a few free-to-download programs that’ll do the job. Sony-Ericsson users for example, can get MyPhoneExplorer.If you don’t have a data cable, but you have access to bluetooth or infra-red (on both your phone and computer) you should be able to port your numbers over those too, though it’ll probably take a little longer. Thus, for most people one of the other backup options will be easier.
- Via your network provider:Increasingly, mobile networks themselves offer to store your data for free. Vodafone customers can use its My Contacts service, and O2 customers can sign up to Bluebook. Orange also offers a backup service, called Memory Mate, but it charges you a one-off fee of £2.99 for the privilege (unless you are upgrading in store). 3 and T-mobile users should check the web-based options below.
- On the web:Zyb offers both a back-up utility and mobile-based social networking site for free. It’ll also transfer your numbers onto any new phones you get, easing the transition between handsets, and hopefully putting paid to pesky ‘I lost my phone’ Facebook groups.Anywr also works more like a social networking site, but handily allows you to sync all your email contacts with your phone ones and vice versa. Both these sites are totally free.
- The old-school pen and paper route:For many people this’ll be first choice; for all the fancy new technologies that promise to save you time, there’s still a whole lot to be said for a pen and little address book. Just remember to update the book occasionally with new numbers, and not to ‘put it somewhere safe’, which vanishes from memory the next time you need it.
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