I have until recently counted myself as a pretty basic mobile phone user - I made phone calls and sent the occasional SMS, and that was it. I never felt the urge to send a multimedia message, and I didn't much feel the need for email or any other internet-enabled applications on my phone. After all, I spend much of the day in front of the computer and have all the connectivity I could wish for there, combined with a nice big screen. So for a long time my Nokia E51 fit the bill nicely: light, slim, long battery life and a great, if small, screen. My iPod Touch and aging but effective Sony Clie (Palm clone) did adequate duty as pocket internet device and personal organiser, respectively.

During my rare moments of introspection I could not help thinking that maybe I was being a bit of a Luddite in the area of mobile devices. After all, the Palm PDA has been out of production for years, and carrying three mobile devices tended to negate the lightness and compact form factor of the Nokia E51. Given that all my devices were working well though, I found it hard to justify the expense of a decent smart phone.

When Google announced their take on the Android smart phone, the Nexus One, I was sorely tempted to make the move. The price tag in Australia of at least $850 kept my enthusiasm well in check though, especially when taking into account that I would need an expensive data plan to make the most of the phone. Nonetheless, the seed was sown, and when Vodafone started offering a free HTC Magic on their $29 cap I was ripe for the plucking.

Downside of the Vodafone plan was that the cap plan covered only phone calls, so any data usage would be an additional monthly expense. Having had a long history of miserly monthly expenditure using my Virgin Mobile SIM, I decided to seek out a more economical option. It didn't take much research to discover that my ISP, Exetel, had exactly what I needed. I acquired several SIM cards on their BUSMA plan - free SIMs, free VoIP plan, no monthly charges other than actual usage, reasonable data charges of 1.5c per MB, so it basically ticked all the boxes. I even had a devious plan for what to do with the now-redundant Vodafone SIM: I would dump it on my wife! She was already on a similar cap plan with Virgin, so it was just a case of terminating that plan and starting the Vodafone plan.

Long story shortish, I acquired the HTC Magic on the Vodafone plan, registered for the Exetel SIM's, terminated the Virgin Mobile contracts, and basically ended up with a modern Android powered smart phone for not much money at all.