I have been asked a few times now how it’s possible for an individual to develop for mobile when phones and tariffs are so expensive. This problem is particularly pertinent to multi-platform development.

The obvious answer is to charge enough for your application or to your end customer to cover phone costs. As an indication, about 10% of my freelance overheads are phone/tariff purchase costs. If you are working freelance, make it clear in contracts what phones you will be testing on.

Here are some further pointers…

• Buy phones just before they are needed on a project, rather than ‘for fun’ when they are first released. They often have inflated prices to start that decrease significantly with time.
• Calculate the total cost of ownership when comparing prices with/without a tariff. It’s almost always cheaper to buy SIM free (without tariff).
• Consider buying phones via ebay. It matters less that a phone isn’t 100% new as it’s only used for testing. However, check that the phone isn’t locked to a particular network operator.
• Join and interact with phone OEM and network operator developer programmes. You can sometimes get subsidised handsets and in some (rare) cases free handsets that are usually prototypes. Over the years I have received prototypes from Microsoft, Compaq, Nokia, O2, 3 and Sony Ericsson.
• Consider renting handsets such as via Paca Mobile Centre.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Mobile, Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.