OK.
here's the thread closer.
Your contract with T-mobile (airtime) is independant from that which includes your handset (Sale of goods).
Sale of goods act states that retailers must fix or replace faulty products within a "reasonable" timeframe. What constitutes reasonable is not mentioned, however for many mobile retailers the understanding is around 14-28 days.
If a handset is sent to a manufacturer you can expect the time of repair to be at the longer end of the range since they will likely have a higher number o f repairs to contend with. Conversely, manufacturers are more given to simply exchanging faulty handsets.
The apple point is null, since they have direct outlets, HTC, Nokia et all dont have the same sort of sales structure.
The fact that your handset will be provided on a seperate contract to your airtime (yes it is,I know it doesn't seem that way, but it is) means that T-mobile need not compensate you for the lack of use of your SIM. You MAY be able to extract a goodwill gesture from them but don't expect it to be very much and giving call centre ops a hard time wont acheive it.
If you end up having a repeating fault then the retailer may offer to exchange the unit for an alternative model, but this will only be after a number of repeated issues.They needn't even provide this though. You could raise a county-court order, but that'll cost you £30 or more dpending on the court you approach and unless you've had endless issues then if they move to defend it then you'll end up with nothing but an order to pay their legal costs.The alternative would be a "letter before action" mail to them, for the sake of, what, £30, maybe £40, they may just hand it over to avoid the bother.
Long story short - No, you're not likely to get much out of T-Mobile.