O2 Pay As You Go Talkalot > Reviews (17)

Having been an o2 customer for many years, in fact ever since I got my first mobile phone at the age of 14, I was keen to see what all the fuss was about with regards to their relatively new sim card that offers 300 free messages and 1Mb of WAP for you to go surfing the net on your phone with.

I have always been one to text and rarely phone anyone (unless its my taxi service or rather my mum!). Not so long ago, o2 changed their tariffs slightly, and the price to send a text message on the original tariff went up from 10p to 12p. Now being a bit of a text addict, I wasn't happy with this, therefore swapped onto the talkalot tariff which still offers texts at 10p, which is a bit on the strange side when the tariff is called talkalot!

Anyway, I swapped onto the talkalot tariff and was fairly happy, as each month my £6.99 was taken off my phone for my text 100 bolt on (if you're not familiar with o2 they offer various 'bolt ons' whereby you pay a certain amount per month to get a number of messages, my messages were working out at 7p rather than 10p), but I was always using up the messages, and therefore spending roughly £10 on my phone, if not more when I was feeling the urge to send more messages!

My friend had recently bought the genie sim card, and seemed rather impressed with it. I had been tempted to buy it for a while now, but there was just something stopping me. In the end, I decided that I was spending £10 on my phone a month, and even though I didn't use 300 messages a month, I would benefit from the sim card.

I had been told that you could get your hands on the sim card for free off the o2 website, but looking into it I could only do this if I was buying a new phone. However, as pointed out by a friend the other day, o2 often have days when they are offering the sim for free. The actual cost of the sim card if you buy one yourself either from an o2 shop or off their website is £9.99, however, you can get them off ebay for as little as 99p.

If you are already with o2 and want to switch to this tariff, you can do without having to purchase a new sim card. However, I decided against this because I was informed by o2 that they would take £9.99 credit off my phone as this was the price of the sim card, and this wasn't going to activate the messages either. In the end I bought a sim card off ebay for £1.60.

When you have your sim card, you have to put £10 on your phone to activate the 300 messages and the 1MB of WAP. In the booklet that is given with the sim card, it says that the messages will be activated within the next 48 hours, however, mine were working immediately, which was definitely a bonus. Each month all you have to do is top up your phone with £10 to activate the messages. The £10 is then there to do what you please with, which is what I think the real bonus with this sim card, is! The day you top up your phone is your anniversary date, and every month after this date, your messages will start again, providing you have topped up your phone with £10.

if you miss the date, don't worry, you will just be charged the normal 10p to send a message until you top up your phone, then the new date will become your anniversary date.

With the sim card there are 4 options for you to choose from:

1) 300 text messages, 0 picture messages, 1Mb of WAP
2) 200 text messages, 25 picture messages, 1Mb of WAP
3) 100 text messages, 50 picture messages, 1Mb of WAP
4) 0 text messages, 75 picture messages, 1M of WAP

This allows people who like to send picture messages to also benefit from this sim card!

There is also a variation of this sim card where by as described above, you top up your phone with £10 of credit each month, but with this sim card you get 100 anyone anytime minutes, 100 text messages and 33 media messages, as well as the 1Mb of WAP.

O2 is a reasonable network, otherwise I wouldn't have been with it for nearly 5 years! Any problem I have had, has been dealt with immediately when I have phoned them up. Once they put double credit on my phone, and then sent me a message to say that they had realised their mistake, but were not going to take this money back, whereas some other networks may have. Phone calls to o2 are quite expensive (50p per min) but there is an email service on their website, which I have used to good effect on several occasions, the problem or query has always been sorted and o2 are very quick at getting back to you.

Overall this is a very good sim card and network to be on, and I would thoroughly recommend it!