Shop! Mary Portas at Phones 4U Is it just me, or are mobile phones less reliable than they used to be? I remember my first Nokia: an unattractive brick of a thing, with fiddly buttons and a dodgy camera, but it always worked faultlessly. Today's phones are portable computers of unparalleled technological complexity, but am I alone in wondering if their developers have somewhat missed the point? A lot of the people I know who own an iPhone say the phone itself is desperately unreliable, cutting out randomly or failing to connect at all. Me, I'm a BlackBerry girl, but more through habit than choice. Call me oldfashioned, but I don't like too much touch-screen stuff, and don't care what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur - just give me a phone that works and access to my emails. Yet even these basic functions are not always delivered without problems, as last year's enormous BlackBerry outage fiasco demonstrated, when millions of users were left effectively phoneless for three days. I've been on a contract with O2 for a few years now but am told that the only way to secure a decent price on your contract in today's world is to shop around. So where you used to be able to rely on your favoured supplier to offer you, the loyal customer, a fair and honest renewal price every year, you're now obliged to trawl the market, as with car and home insurance, to find a decent deal. Phone companies, it seems, are at least canny enough to try to negotiate the life out of you to hang on to your business. Phones 4U, one of the big boys, started life 25 years ago as Midlands Mobile Phones, when an entrepreneur, John Caudwell, and his brother created a shop to wholesale mobile phones; the Caudwell Group was sold to a private equity firm for £1.46 billion 19 years later. Staggering. Shopability On one of my old telly shows I remember giving a phone shop a makeover and bemoaning the lack of useful information in most of the high street branches I visited. But to its credit Phones 4U has a fairly idiot-proof system, which made sense even to me. Next to each phone a mini-poster outlines all the key information. My phone, the BlackBerry Curve 9300, is free on a tariff of £13.50 per month and I was also given the low-down on the phone's connectivity, camera, video and its most popular accessories. The shop's main promotional slot had been given over to the new Samsung Galaxy Note - somewhere between the size of an iPhone and iPad - which, according to the extremely helpful man who came over to chat to me, is probably best avoided, unless you fancy going back to the days of carrying a brick in your pocket. Was I being served? Phone shops have a shocking reputation for aggressive sales techniques and poor service. A few years back Phones 4U even got into trouble with Ofcom for misleading customers over network coverage, failing to provide refunds swiftly for faulty handsets and having unfair terms on chequeback schemes, but I saw none of that in Glasgow. The sales assistant who warned me against the Samsung then left me alone for several minutes to browse in peace, then engaged in some polite chat about the latest BlackBerry Bold which, he said, boasted some of the features of the iPhone with the trusted performance of the BlackBerry. Then he moved in for the kill and asked when my contract was up. I left impressed with a man I would have trusted to find me a decent deal without pushing me into something I would possibly regret later. Online Back home I found the online experience - again - more helpful than I'd imagined. Phones4u.co.uk offered me nine different tariffs on a new BlackBerry 9900. The cheapest was with Orange at £15.50 a month, the most expensive with O2 for a crazy £36 a month (although the latter did include unlimited calls, texts and 1GB of downloads). Verdict Phones 4U now employs more than 8,000 people worldwide and sells 26 phones every minute. Last year it opened 84 new stores, of which 42 were in Dixons - a new strategy to try to touch an older, more affluent demographic, rather than simply targeting the cash-strapped youth market. I left the Glasgow branch surprised at the level of service, and hopeful that an industry which was once on a par with estate agents for sophistication and elegance had possibly now grown up a bit. There's still room for improvement. The store was your average phoneshop fit out, with a few handsets around the side, some posters and a stack of daily deals. Is there no other way? If phone shops are going to continue to occupy so many of the units on our high streets, why can't they provide a more exciting retail model? I don't want to carp on about Apple more than I already do but, even if their phones don't work, they do seem to have created a retail experience that makes Phones 4U look as outdated as my old Nokia. Phones 4U Buchanan Street, Glasgow Visited Tuesday, 1pm Number of stores 470 What they sell Mobile phones and accessories Website phones4u.co.uk Who's in charge? Tim Whiting, chief executive