New price tools on GSMArena

Starting today, there's a spanking new feature on our website. Think prices! The price is the second most important thing about a mobile phone after megapixels (just kidding of course), so we thought you would like to have that as an additional reference point when you go hunting for your next mobile phone.

It's been 8 years in the business for us and we've received thousands of requests for adding prices our mobile phones catalog. Well, up until now we've been steering clear of that as we didn't want to be confused with a mobile phone shop (and, as a matter of fact, we still don't). The main purpose of our catalog is to provide you with the most accurate information possible about all GSM mobile phones. A fact's a fact: we DO NOT sell mobile phones and we're not affiliated with any vendor.

But knowing that price tags are really important to you, we've finally found a way to implement them, one way or the other. In fact, as of today, you will find prices mentioned in two places on our website.

First are the specification pages. Go ahead, open a specs page for a mobile phone that is currently available and scroll down. Right there at the end you will find a new field called "Price group". Since we are still committed to not displaying absolute prices, you can use the Price group field to compare handsets. It's a scale of one to ten based on the real prices of handsets. And it's universal, if Nokia N82 (listed in the example below) has 7 full icons out of ten, it's most clearly more expensive than the Nokia 6500 slide (with 5 icons out of ten).

The new Price groups on the Specifictions pages

Now, though you may find that pretty abstract, we think it's enough to get you started when comparing two mobiles.

Secondly, (and you might find that more exciting), there is the new Price field in our Advanced search engine. If you still haven't used it, go ahead and pay it a visit (pun intended). There you'll find more specific price numbers - and there's even a dropdown list for you to pick currency (USD or EUR only, guys).

The new Price groups in Advanced search

But when you use that field in your searches, you should bear in mind the following:

• Those price groups are based on the lowest SIM-free price in the sources we've chosen to use (not telling which they are)
• Those price groups are based on prices before taxes, subsidies and shipment costs.
• Only phones with known prices will be listed when you use that field (we'll try including prices for phones that are not yet available, too)

Currently, over 400 available mobile phones have been assigned a price and that number will keep growing. So, those are two new tools to use in the quest for the phone that's right for you. Try them out and give us your comments.