Grab 1,000 text messages for free!

[Henry]

Grab 1,000 text messages for free!

What's the deal?

Until the end of April Orange is giving away free PAYG mobile sim cards which include 1,000 free SMS text messages too. As the standard cost of a text message is 5-10p on most mobile tariffs, this promotion offers £50-£100 worth of messaging for nowt - superb! And better still; you don't even need to add credit to it to get the texts.

How to get the free texts

Visit Orange's free sim + 1,000 texts webpage and sign up to receive a free sim. Once you've received this, which should be within seven days, call 0800 079 0006 to register it. Within 14 days of doing that, your sim will be credited with 1,000 texts to use within 30 days.

Plus, all new Orange customers can get £1 or £5 free credit (or win a Nintendo Wii if you're lucky!) by texting 'ORANGE' to 60040. Read the full details.

You'll either need a mobile phone on Orange's network or one that's unlocked and can read any sim. If yours isn't able to use an Orange sim, read Mobile Unlocking to see if your handset can be opened to all networks for free.

The offer's limited to one sim per customer.

Why's Orange doing this?

Of course, it'd be nice to think Orange is being super genorous by offering this freebie, but I think it's more to do with the war between networks to gain new customers, thus Orange is hoping once you've got its sim it'll remain your main or only provider for further calls and texts.

So after you've used your free text messages, either decide if an Orange PAYG tariff is the cheapest option for you (read the Cheapest Mobiles article to help you decide) or just keep the sim handy in case you ever want to take advantage of 2 for 1 cinema visits with Orange Wednesday (unfortunately the free texts can't be used for this).

If you do plan to use the sim permenantly it's worth knowing it automatically registers on the 'speak easy with unlimited text reward' tariff. But if you're more of a chatterbox than text-a-holic, change to the 'speak easy with bonus top-up' as you'd get more for your cash when topping-up.