Never USE your phone, Mr. World Traveler Guy

My recent trip to the US went really well, even though I certainly missed my family. While in California, I used my mobile phone to happily talk to people there in the States and also folks back here at home. It was a sum total of about 68 minutes, including calls both sent and received.

Thanks to the incredible rates from Vodafone, I got a bill today showing that cost me a nice €96. For about an hour. Fuck that.

On the plus side, if I'd not used Skype for most of my longer chats with home, I'd be in really deep doo-doo. Lesson learned, Mr Vodafone Man.

Next time, I'll use MAXroam.

The tricky game of Vodafone

One afternoon this past month I downloaded some email and browsed the web a bit on my Nokia N95 8GB phone. Traffic, according to the Vodafone bill I just opened, totaled about 600kB. They charged me €8.80 + VAT for this.

Also, I'm on the Perfect Choice 100 plan and because I went 100 texts over my limit they charged a total of €12.24 for those messages. (I seem to text far more than talk on my phone.)

Now I'm going online at home to see if I can change my account, and find I can pay €8.26 + VAT for 15MB of traffic. About the same cost for 14.5 megs more traffic. Jesus.

And, to address the larger texting problem, I can pay €6.61 + VAT to bump my text limit from 100 to 250 texts in the month. Half the cost for 50% more than what I exceeded the limit with last month. I've not gone past 200 texts, so this would seem to be the better choice for me (and not switch my whole calling plan).

I'm going to add the texts, and resist the urge to be online with my phone (at least via Vodafone, still using a wifi connection where available) for a while and see if I can accept it.