O2 UK have launched a new way to get the latest communicator without getting all of your money taken away. To put it simply, your (UK) contract is a combined price of both service and handset. With new devices costing more than PCs and Tablets without a contract, service providers effectively give you a form of finance on a device. You commit to two years at a price and you get the cost of your device spread across that time.

As time and technology have gone from a brisk walk to a full-out sprint, it’s easy to have yesterday’s flagship turn in to today’s paperweight in the space of 6 months. Thus, starting on the 16th of April (in store – online coming soon) O2 in the UK will be offering a ‘decoupled’ contract.

Official Blurb:

O2 today announces the launch of O2 Refresh, the first 24 month tariff to decouple the cost of the phone from the cost of calls, texts and data. O2 Refresh has been designed for customers to get a new phone at any time, without having to pay out their airtime contract. Instead, customers simply pay the remaining balance for their phone and then start afresh.

How O2 Refresh works

A customer buys a HTC One on O2 Refresh and chooses to pay £17 per month for their Airtime Plan and gets unlimited minutes, unlimited texts and 1GB of data. They then choose to pay £20 per month for their Phone Plan and pay £49.99 up front, meaning their combined O2 Refresh tariff costs £37 per month, the same as they would pay on a standard 24 month Pay Monthly contract. The total amount they will pay for the phone is £529.99.

At this point, O2 have nothing to announce about how and if this new system will work with 4G contracts later this year.