Why dealmobile.co.uk?
This site lives on the domain of Deal Mobile, the phone deals site I built, which ran from 2011 to 2019.
The domain is older than this site. It was Deal Mobile, a mobile phone deals site I built, and when I needed a home for my own work I used the domain I already had.
What it was
Deal Mobile compared mobile phone deals from UK retailers and networks: contracts, pay as you go, SIM-free and SIM-only, plus mobile broadband and the free gifts that came with deals back then. Every phone had its own page, with filters for network, monthly cost, data, minutes, texts, contract length and gift, and any two phones could be compared side by side. It was an affiliate site: a deal linked straight to the retailer, which paid a commission on a sale.
The listings were large for a small site. In November 2011 the home page counted 2,418 phones, 2,869 tariffs and 994,202 individual deals from 27 retailers. By the end of 2015 it was 3,669 phones and 1,032,942 deals from 31 retailers. Among them were Carphone Warehouse, Phones4u, e2save, Mobiles.co.uk, Dialaphone, Tesco Mobile and the networks themselves: O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, Three and later EE. The home page showed when the deals were last updated.
How long it ran
The Internet Archive first captured the site in November 2011, and it ran until December 2019 with the same design throughout. Over those eight years the phones on its home page went from the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and the Galaxy Nexus, through the HTC One X and the Galaxy S III, to the iPhone 7 and the Galaxy S10. In 2020 the domain went quiet behind a one-line holding page.
You can still browse the old site in the Wayback Machine. Links to its phone and comparison pages now come here.
What lives here now
The domain hosts this site and the things I build in my own time: Where Should I Live at tax.dealmobile.co.uk, the Solar Calendar at solar.dealmobile.co.uk, the TurboPush demo and the Apple News API documentation.
