The mobile phone market in the UK may get confusing for many people. With so many deals, so many phone, so many tariffs it is unclear if you are getting a fair deal.

Most of the sales teams in the shops seem like they help you but most of them are trying to sell you the highest paid contracts and the longest. This gets them the highest commission and the company needs to pass some sort of targets set by the networks for more bonuses. See Channel 4 Dispatches: The mobile phone rip off for more details.

If I were to buy a phone I would first choose the network or networks that I would go for. Firstly because of the phone coverage in my area. Most networks have coverage maps on their websites.

Choosing your mobile phone - If you are not bothered what phone you get then you can choose from the cheaper handsets so you will get a better deal on your contract. If you have particular phones that you want you should make a list of these and then use comparison sites to see phones from your chosen network or networks.

Tariff - make sure you choose the right tariff for you, if you talk a lot get a lot of minutes, if you don't text get the least amount of free texts.

Free Gifts - they aren't really free. Offers with free gifts come with higher line rental.

List of UK Mobile Phone Comparison Websites

G Phone Shop - The site has a lot of information onh omepage but it's layout is perfect. It shows the most popular handsets and latest handsets at first. You can get the latests news as an RSS feed. You can refine your search using Network, filter out results with how many minutes and texts. Once you click on a handset you get the cheapest results first. You can order them to suit what you want. You can filter out phones with free gifts. You can also choose the top ten mobile phones. Huge range of retailers that are reliable.

One Compare - The site looks clean and clear but not much options for refinement. Homepage is not very good, shows a few phones, you need to go to another page to search. You can's broswe through different phones very easily. Good reliable retailers.

Urmob - you can compare contract phones by handset, netwrok, colour and free mobiles.

The best thing about this website is that you can choose your minutes and texts and see the offers you have.

Mobile-Phones - This is the best looking site with a full range of features to help you choose the right phone.

The best site with all the features in my opinion is G Phone Shop

G Phone shop also has Pay as you go phones that you can compare prices on from top online retailers. The website is updated daily so you find the latest deals.

I am currently working on a comparison website using Urmob data feeds. I have played around with it on GGadget (I am still working on this site).