New Samsung Phone Costs Just £3

Plenty of networks offer phones for ‘free’ - but you end up paying out a fortune in monthly fees for the next two years.

But with the Samsung E1270, it is quite genuinely £3.

The flip phone is commonly available for £10 - but is on offer via online store Rakuten for less than the price of a pint.

It’s Pay As You Go on EE, so there are no monthly fees at all - and EE thrown in £4 of credit to sweeten the deal.

The downside is that this is, essentially, a phone from about a decade ago.

There are no apps, it can’t really go online, you can’t use Wi-Fi and there’s no camera or sat-nav.

But for using outdoors, or if you already carry a tablet, it’s perfect.

Flip phones, it’s worth noting, are making something of a comeback over the past years. Stars such as Rihanna and Vogue’s Anna Wintour have been pictured with the gadgets in recent months.

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The machines have been making a surprise comeback over the past two years, and are now actually denting smartphone sales in hi-tech Japan, one of the first countries to have internet-capable phones.

Smartphone sales have fallen for the second year running in Japan, with sales of flip phones such as Sharp’s Aquos K rising 5.7% year on year.

Takao Shinkai on Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper suggests the big reasons could be price (even the new versions are much cheaper), better battery life and the fact the things are hard to smash.

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Phone companies such as Samsung and Sharp have launched new handsets to cope with demand.

Analysts Gartner believe that the boom is partly driven by older phone users who don’t want all the features of smartphones – and that Western Europe could be next for a flip-phone comeback.