I urgently need to know what 3g and wifi means?

[rainbowinthesky]

I have just bought a mobile from tescos to use one of their sim cards on and it has 2g and no wifi. What does this mean? I cant see that I can use my homeinternet connection on the phone to watch bbc i player? Is that because it doesnt have wifi or 3g?

I just want a cheap phone that I can use for the internet, email, texts and calls. I bought a LG Town C300 but will return it tomorrow if it cant do these things well.

Any help??

Wifi - or sometimes called WLAN (as in Wireless Local Area Network) is the part which would allow you to use a wireless router at home. 2G, 3G are concerning the facilities usable over the mobile (GSM) networks.

The 'using iPlayer at home' question concerning using Wi-Fi (or in this case, that the phone does not have it).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of phones do not include it, and I have yet to see many websites for UK stores include the use of it as a 'features' you can choose. For example, on Ebay, you can filter the range of phones to include those which have Bluetooth, or MP3 player, or Radio, how detailed the camera may be (from VGA to 1, 2, 3, 5 up to 12 Megapixels) but there's no similar tick-box to choose only models which include Wi-Fi.

Further, when a phone does include it, the cost seems quite a lot higher. You can get some touch-screen (but otherwise 'basic') phones for under 35 pounds but for ones including Wi-Fi, I suspect you will find few at under 100 to 200 pounds (on PAYG) or be tied into a costly contract, unfortunately.

(I have been looking for a PAYG phone with Wi-Fi support myself, but have seen nothing I can justify, just on [high] cost grounds, so will have to wait.)

Thanks. My last phone was a Nokia N85 and I could watch eastenders etc in bed by connecting to my home wireless and I guess wanted to still be able to do this on a much cheaper mobile. Wishful thinking it seems. I dont want to be tied into a lenghty contract paying a lot of money and have got a deal for unlimited texts, internet and calls for £22 a month and can get out of it with 1 months notice.
I bought the phone for £69. Otherwise the phone seems to do what I want for the price.

Thanks again for your help.

GSMarena.com has a detailed description of the LG Town C300 Town C300 here and when I did a search for the same phone via Google, found a fairly negative (sorry) review on CNET's website

In particular, it says about poor browsing and lack of Wi-Fi, and gives a score of 2.5 out of 5.

CNET mention the Samsung Genio (70+ pounds) and Nokia E5 (140+ pounds) but of the two, only the Nokia includes Wi-Fi support.

Have just come back (sorry, did not spot you had posted earlier, as I went off looking at the Tesco Mobile web pages.

From what I have seen, the Nokia C3-00 (as listed on TM site) is the same as the Nokia C3 (GSM arena lists Nokia C3 and Nokia C3-01 but no C3-00... photo seems identical)

Anyway, looks like the Nokia C3-00 does have Wireless support.

Not sure which website I was looking at (have been on a dozen or more) but one certainly had a symbol for Wireless, but obviously you must ask when in Tesco. It is the same price as the LG model you bought, so hopefully there will be no problem swapping them.

Incidentally, having had a look for an unlocked Nokia N85 on Ebay (which would accept the Tesco SIM), I've found someone selling at 99.99 (fixed price, not an auction that could go higher), though it has a scratch down along the side of the face [not across lit pixels area].

Having seen the Nokia C3 phone has Wi-Fi I was quite pleased to find a firm (mobiles.co.uk) has them on Vodafone for 50 quid (+10 pound top-up) so I could get one and use my Asda PAYG SIM with that.

My Asda SIM needs no monthly top-up (I just pay for what I use, and mostly use it for texts at 4p and calls at 8p - much cheaper than most others for the voice calls, though some of these 'addict' bundles for hundreds or thousands of texts might be useful sometime...

Might use the Tesco SIM in one of my other, unlocked phones, as their 5 quid for 5000 texts seems too good to be true (and yes, eventually I think I could use that many... for marketing some websites)

Thanks for the help. No, it hasnt got good reviews. Looked at the nokia c3-00 and as you say it does have wifi. It seems that for the price I want to pay noone has 3g. I think I'll give tescos a call and ask about changing.

Thanks - I have spoken to tesco who said I can just go in and swap the phone for a Nokia C3-00 even though I've already used it. Thanks again for all your help, Networkguy.

For anyone else (and rainbowinthesky if it is still possible to return the phone!) there's the [[http://tinyurl.com/OBIL-Europa
Samsung Europa i5500]] phone which has both Wi-Fi and 3G support, ([[http://tinyurl.com/EuropaOBIL
full details]])

It is priced between 80 and 100 pounds (+tenner top-up) depending on the network you wish to use, from OBIL.co.uk (which is a web-only site run by Carphone Warehouse, which listed the phone on its February price list but no longer mentions it on their primary website). It was reduced from about 150 pounds at CPW shops (from the price list info, and they might still have it in some stores).

The other phones at CPW which are under 250 with 3G and Wi-Fi appear to be the Alcatel OT 980 and X10 Mini Pro.

The X10 Mini Pro has a 5 Megapixel camera (compared with 2 Mpixel), in case that's a requirement. Both have QWERTY keyboards.

However, bad news is that neither is available for O2 (which is used for Tesco SIMs), but I iuncluded them anyway because others might want to consider them, as they run Android and are currently reduced to about 100 and 130 pounds respectively.