# Contract Phones



## MJRevell (Mar 30, 2009)

Hi there,

Forgive the ignorance -- but I've only ever used pay as you go phones.

If I take up a contract on a phone, what happens when it finishes? Am I able to revert to pay as you go if I want to? 

Am I forced to take up another contract in order for it to work?


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## dustinzgirl (Mar 30, 2009)

It totally depends on the phone company!

with US Cellular, once your contract is up you can just keep using the same service or get pay as you go service. 

If you do switch to a contract, pay the extra five bucks a month for theft/loss/damage insurance. Trust me, its worth it. Otherwise you get stuck with paying a lot more.


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## Tillane (Mar 30, 2009)

I think that over here in the UK you should be able to move straight onto pay as you go without switching phones or companies.  Once your contract runs out, just get in touch with the company and let them know you want to switch to pay as you go; they should do the rest.

One thing you might want to be careful of, though.  I've heard a couple of friends mention that their mobile company (think it was O2 in both cases) tried to automatically renew their contract without contacting them first.  Very naughty, and I would have thought illegal, but worth keeping in mind in case yours tries the same.


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## Lenny (Mar 31, 2009)

I believe that you can pop a PAYG SIM card into any handset and it will work, regardless of whether the handset is one you got from a contract - it's my understanding that the SIM card is what matters. Think of the handset as an empty shell that is made useful only with the SIM. A nice computer-based analogy:

You've got an Intel architecture PC, and three hard drives - one with Windows installed, another with the latest Mac OS X installed, and one with a Linux distro installed. Until you connect one of the hard drives, the computer is just a shell.

As long as the PAYG SIM is from the same company you got the phone from (doesn't matter if the handset is unlocked, but if you put an O2 SIM into an Orange handset, it won't work) then everything is gravy.

So yeah, short answer - just change the SIM to a PAYG SIM.


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