Ewan Main

Just a straightforward tip, this, but in my searches throughout the web I never found anything that brought all this information into one place, so I thought I’d share it here.

I recently discovered I’d finally come to the end of my iPhone 3G contract because the Carphone Warehouse rang me up to offer me a new tariff. I resisted upgrading as I’m waiting for the next iPhone to come out, so they put me on the £15-per-month O2 Simplicity tariff with a £7.50-per-month internet bolt-on, and told me my iPhone would continue functioning exactly as before. They were either lying or uninformed: within 20 seconds of the phone call ending, my tariff switched over and I lost the ability to use visual voicemail or MMS. The data bolt-on wasn’t there either.

Fortunately, it’s all now fixed, and for even less money per month. Here’s what you need to do:

• Contact O2 by dialling 2302 from your iPhone. It needs to be O2, not a reseller, as only O2 staff have access to the tariff you need.
• Tell them you’ve reached the end of your contract and you’d like to move onto the iPhone Simplicity tariff. This is not the same as the normal Simplicity tariff, and it’s not advertised on their website. It’s only £20 per month, is on a one-month rolling contract (perfect if you’re holding on for the next update) and allows your iPhone to keep all of its features. You’ll know when it’s changed over – again, mine was instant – because visual voicemail will suddenly be unavailable.
• Set up your (non-visual) voicemail, and think nostalgically about what it used to be like when voicemail was always like this. Get someone to ring you and leave a message. Then connect to your voicemail and listen to the message as usual. This will trigger the system to set up your visual voicemail, and you’ll magically have it again within a few minutes.
• Next, send a text message to 1010, containing just the letters MMS. You’ll get a text message back telling you they’re setting up MMS for you. A few minutes later, a shiny bright O2-themed picture message will arrive telling you it’s all set up.

There you go – same functionality as before, but at a substantially lower price and with no contract tie-in. And it feels good.

One small other note – when I did this, I also lost the ability to receive push notifications while I was outside of the house, but it came back again within a day or so. It may have just been coincidence – after all, there was a Boxcar outage that day, and perhaps nobody said anything to me on Facebook – but you never know.