Can anyone recommend me a tariff, contract or otherwise, which will work out cheapest for me?

I mainly use it for text messages, 5-10 a day.
I rarely use it for calls, maybe 5-10 minutes a week.

The cheapest I've found so far would be O2's online pay as you go tariff where you get 300 texts a month for £10, but that would mean the phone would cost be alot.
I was ideally looking at the Sony Ericsson t610.

Thanks in advance.

I'm not totally sure about tariffs, but I definetly recommend O2.

I used to be on O2 about a year ago before I moved to Virgin Mobile, and had no complaints so I'm not worried about going back.

I see. I think the tarrif you're talking about is the same one that I was interested in the last time I was looking a couple of months ago. It seemed quite good.

It seems perfect for me, but it means I'm going to have to shell out a lot for the phone I want.

Virgin Mobile offer 3p texts to other Virgin mobiles!

Luckily nearly all of my friends who I text often are on Virgin mobile.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there using "lesser" network operators and you probably wouldn't know many people on Virgin.

Why don't you get talking them into it like I did a few years ago?

As someone else has said in this thread, they got fed up of O2, saw red and went to the fantastic Virgin Mobile. They really are a lot better. (No they don’t pay me to say this)

I don't know anyone other than me on Virgin Mobile, so thats no use!
I think you misread what I put about O2, I bought a Virgin Mobile just because it was cheaper at the time.
I'm totally fed up of Virgin don't want another. The one thing that annoyed me the most was to register my debit card I had to phone a charged number, so I was paying them money, just so I could pay them more money!

im pretty sure you can do that over the internet...for free

Virgin are great by the way

Yes, 10p one off charge, that’s a very petty thing to complain about.

It wasn't the cost it was the point that annoyed me.
With Virgin I quite often don't receive messages until hours after they were sent, and people never receive mine. Whether this is Virgins fault or not, it never used to be a problem with Orange and O2.
The coverage can be quite poor where I live too.